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Chapter 5: The Letter To The Hebrews

The Gospel of the Approach to God

It may well be said that the whole of the Letter to the Hebrews is written on one text: "Let us draw near" (10:22). Its central idea is the new and free approach to God which has become possible through Jesus Christ.

The writer to the Hebrews wrote out of a double background. The thinkers and the seekers from the two backgrounds would have used different language and different categories of thought, but fundamentally they would have been saying the same thing and searching for the same thing.

The writer to the Hebrews wrote out of a Greek background. It was Plato who gave the world the conception of forms or ideas. For him the unseen world was the real world. In it there were laid up the forms, the ideas, the perfect archetypes and patterns of which everything in this world is a pale and imperfect copy. To put it at its very simplest, there is in the unseen world a perfect idea of a chair of which all man-made chairs are imperfect copies. This world of space and time is not the real world, the things which we can see and touch and handle are not the real things. The real world is the invisible world beyond. Philo believed that God created the unseen world first with all its perfect patterns, and then created the visible world as a copy of the unseen (Concerning the Creator of the World 16). Seneca explains to Lucilius that the ideas of which Plato spoke were "what all visible things were created from and what formed the pattern for all things" (Letters 57:18, 19). In the Letter to the Hebrews there is a direct echo of this when the writer speaks of the Temple in Jerusalem as being "a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary", and when he recalls how Moses was instructed to make everything according to the pattern shown to him on the heavenly mount (8:5). For the Greek, then, the search was for access to reality in the invisible world beyond.

The writer to the Hebrews wrote out of a Hebrew background. There was one essential difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. The Greek searched for truth; the Hebrew searched for God. The Greek searched for knowledge; the Hebrew searched for the living God. For the Greek at the end of the search there was a truth; for the Hebrew at the end of the search there was a person. The Hebrew would always say, not: "I know what I have believed", but "I know whom I have believed" (II Timothy 1:12). Further, when we were studying the Fourth Gospel, we have already seen that the Greek would regard the discovery of truth or God as impossible so long as a man was shackled and imprisoned in the body. Even the Wisdom literature of the Jews has an echo of this line of thought. "The corruptible body", says the Sage, "presses down upon the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weighs down the mind that muses upon many things" (Wisdom 9:15). But the true Hebrew would certainly hold that a man can know God here and now.

So then the Hebrew sought for God; and therein precisely lies his problem. God to the Hebrew was holy, kadosh in Hebrew, hagios in Greek; and the basic meaning of this word is separate, different, other. God, as modern theology was later to express it, is the Wholly Other. Not only did the Hebrew think of God as wholly other; he also regarded it as dangerous and even deadly to seek to approach that white blaze of purity in which God lives.

Moses heard God say: "You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live" (Exodus 33:20) After the incident at Peniel it was Jacob's astonished exclamation: "I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved" (Genesis 32:30). When Moses came down from the mount the people exclaimed in astonishment: "We have this day seen God speak with man and man still live" (Deuteronomy 5:24). When Manoah discovered who his heavenly visitor had been, he said to his wife in terror: "We shall surely die because we have seen God" (Judges 13:22). When Gideon knew to whom he had been speaking, and when terror gripped him, the voice of God calmed him: "Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die" (Judges 6:22, 23). Into the Holy of Holies in the Temple no man but the High Priest might go, and he only on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16); and even in his case the regulations laid it down that he must not linger too long in that holiness, "lest he put Israel in terror".

Here then was the situation. The Greek was seeking access to that elusive reality which he could only find when he had sloughed off the body; the Jew was seeking access to the God who was the Holy One and the Wholly Other. The argument of the writer to the Hebrews is that Jesus is the only one in whom there is free and open access to reality and to God. To this end the writer to the Hebrews describes Jesus under five great terms.

I. Jesus is the archegos of our faith (12:2). The AV renders author, with beginner in the margin; the RV, author, with captain in the margin; the PSV and Moffatt, pioneer; Weymouth, Prince Leader; Kingsley Williams, leader; Knox, origin; Phillips, source; Wuest, originator. The NEB speaks of Jesus on wham our faith depends from start to finish.

Obviously, the word is not easy to render. It has two lines of meaning. First, it does mean a prince, a leader, a commander. Second, its more characteristic meaning is that of a beginner of something which still exists. Thus it can mean the founder of a city or a family or a school of philosophy, the one who blazes the trail for others to follow in his footsteps. Someone has used the analogy from a shipwreck. If a ship is wrecked and some gallant man swims ashore with a rope along which others can follow in safety, that man is the archegos. He went first to make it possible for others to follow. So Jesus is the pioneer who blazes the way into the presence of God that we may follow.

2. Jesus is the prodromos (6:20). Prodromos is a military word, and the prodromoi were the scouts who went on ahead to see that it was safe for the main body to follow. It has been said that the word was used to describe the pilot boat which sailed in front of the larger vessels, as they entered the harbour of Alexandria, to show them where the right channel was. Here we have the same idea again. Jesus goes first for us to follow.

3. Central to the thought of the writer to the Hebrews is the idea of the covenant, and in this connection he uses two other terms about Jesus. Jesus is the egguos, the surety or guarantor of a better covenant (7:22), and he is the mesites, the mediator of the new covenant (8:6; 9:15; 12:24).

The covenant, as we have seen, was a relationship between God and Israel, in which God in his free, spontaneous grace had chosen Israel to be his people, and had offered himself as their God. The maintenance of the covenant was dependent on the keeping of the Law (Exodus 24:3-8). The sacrificial system was devised to restore the relationship when man's disobedience had broken it. Quite clearly, for all its greatness this covenant is very imperfect.

(a) The Law is bound to be broken. Since man is a sinner, he cannot fully keep and obey the Divine Law. To make the covenant dependent on that is to make it dependent on an impossibility.

(b) The priests are doubly imperfect. First, the priest, being himself a sinner, must first offer sacrifice for his own sins (7:27). A sinner cannot really be the means of atoning for sin. Second. the priests of the old covenant are subject to death. Being mortal men, they are born and die, and come and go with no permanency (7:23).

(c) The sacrifices of the old covenant are clearly ineffective, because day in and day out they have to be made over and over again. Whatever temporary effect they may have, they have no permanent effect on the situation created by sin (10:1-3).

(d) In any event the sacrifice of animals is unavailing because what God desires is the sacrifice of a life dedicated in loving obedience to his will (10:5-10).

The old covenant is a shadow and a copy of reality, but it is not the real thing. But there is nothing surprising in this, for the O.T. itself spoke of a new covenant: "Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord; I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least even unto the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (Jeremiah 31:31-34). The very fact that a new covenant is promised shows that the old covenant is obsolete, outdated, and passing away (8:13). And it is to be noted that this new covenant knows nothing of an externally imposed law written in a book: its law is written on the heart; nor does it know anything of sacrifice; the need for sacrifice no longer exists.

It is the claim of the writer to the Hebrews that that new covenant has come in Jesus Christ. Of that new covenant Jesus is the egguos, the sponsor, the guarantor. Of that new covenant he is the mesites. Mesas means in the middle; and a mesites was a middleman, who stood between two people who were estranged and drew them together again.

(e) Let us now see more closely the relationship of Jesus to this new covenant. The new covenant needs a perfect sacrifice. Jesus had made that. Once and for all in offering himself he has made a sacrifice that never needs to be repeated (7:27). The new covenant needs a perfect priest. Jesus is that. Firstly, he is completely identified with the men he came to save. A priest must be such that he can deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness (5:1-2). "We have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning" (4:15). No writer in the NT has a deeper sense of the identification of Jesus with the human situation (2:14; 5:7, 8; 12:2, 3; 13:12). Secondly, the perfect priest cannot take his office upon himself; he must be divinely appointed (5:1). And it is here that the writer to the Hebrews makes his personal and unique contribution to the understanding of Jesus, for he shows us Jesus as the High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek. His picture is wrought out in two passages, which should be carefully studied, 5:1-10 and the whole of chapter 7.

He founds his argument on two OT passages to which he brings all the skill of expert Jewish rabbinic exegesis.

The Lord hath sworn and will not change his mind, "You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." (Psalm 110:4)

After his return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer, and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him (Abraham) at the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King's Valley). And Melchizedek king of Salem brought him bread and wine; he was the priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said:

Blessed be Abraham by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth;

and blessed be God Most High,

who has delivered your enemies into your hand!

(Genesis 14:17-20)

Here a new and unknown priesthood is described, a priesthood which, as the writer to the Hebrews saw it, was the forecast and the symbol of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Let us then follow the argument of the writer to the Hebrews in chapter 7 to see what these passages say to him about the priesthood of Jesus Christ and its superiority to the existing levitical priesthood.

The priesthood of Jesus Christ is a royal priesthood, for Melchizedek was a king. It is a righteous priesthood, for Melchizedek means king of righteousness. It is a peaceful priesthood, for Meichizedek was king of Salem, and Salem is taken to mean peace. The levitical priesthood was entirely dependent on descent from Aaron, and such descent had to be proved and guaranteed; but there is no mention of any genealogy, of any father or mother of Melchizedek; the new priesthood therefore depends on personal power and quality and not on any family tree. There is no mention whatever of either the birth or the death of Melchizedek; he appears as timeless; therefore the new priesthood is eternal, without beginning or end, beginning before time began and unending when time ends.

Now follow a series of arguments to prove the superiority of the new priesthood. The superior always blesses the inferior. Therefore, since Melchizedek blessed Abraham, he is the superior of Abraham, who is no less than the founder of the nation of Israel. Ordinarily it is the Levites who receive tithes, and they do so because the Law entitles them to do so. But Melchizedek was no Levite and yet he received tithes, not because the Law assigned them to him, but as a perfect personal right. Further, the Levites tithe their brethren, but Melchizedek tithed Abraham who was a total stranger to him. Still further, Levi himself paid tithes to Meichizedek, because, although yet unborn, he might be said to be in the body of his great-grandfather Abraham. Every stone in the edifice shows the superiority of the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek to the levitical priesthood.

Still further, the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek is confirmed by nothing less than the oath of God (Psalm 110:4), which makes it far greater than the levitical priesthood. The very mention of the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek demonstrates the inferiority of the levitical priesthood, for, if the levitical priesthood had been adequate and effective, no other priest-hood would ever have been mentioned. And this new priesthood is a complete revolution. The priests came from the tribe of Levi, but Jesus came from the tribe of Judab, from which no priests ever came; and this is the proof, not only of a new kind of priesthood, but of the total abrogation of the old law. Finally, two facts are brought forward which we have already noted. The new priest need make no sacrifice for his own sin for he is sinless, and the sacrifice he made never needs to be repeated but is for ever and for ever effective and availing.

Such is the picture of the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek, the new priesthood which put the old priesthood for ever out of date.

There remains one thing to note. The writer to the Hebrews had an almost unique sense of the total adequacy of the work of Jesus Christ. It stretches back into the past, for it redeems men from transgressions committed under the old covenant (9:15). It reaches forward into the future, for the work of Jesus Christ as high priest is never ended. Even in the heavenly places he carries on his priestly work, for we have a high priest who has passed through the heavens (4:14). He appears in the presence of God on our behalf (9:24). He continues a priest for ever (7:3). He is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (7:25). Here is a picture of Jesus Christ saving in past time, saving in present time, and saving for ever and for ever. And in this picture and behind it there is something even more far-reaching. Its real meaning is that the life and the death and the Cross of Christ are not, as it were, parts of some isolated incident. The incarnation and the crucifixion are not, as it were, emergency measures. This was not done because everything else had been tried and failed. The life and death of Jesus are not simply events in time; they are windows into the eternal heart of God, whereby we see the suffering and redeeming love of God which has been suffering and redeeming since the beginning of time and will be beyond the end of time. In Jesus Christ we see God, not as God for a moment became, but as God for ever was, for ever is, and for ever will be.

The Latin Word for priest is pontifex, which literally means a bridge-builder, and for the writer to the Hebrews the Gospel's essence is that Jesus Christ is for men the bridge into the presence of God. "Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith" (10:19-22).

Chapter 4: Paul

The Gospel of Faith

Paul’s problem was the problem of every man who is aware that there is a God; his problem was how to get into a right relationship with God, how to escape from a situation dominated by distance, fear, estrangement, frustration into a relationship enriched by intimacy, friendship, confidence and trust. In one of his novels, H. G. Wells has a picture of a big business man who was so tensed and strained with the pace of living that he was in danger of complete collapse. His doctor told him that his one hope of sanity and balance lay in finding some kind of fellowship with God. "What?" the man said. "That up there having fellowship with me? I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the milky way or shaking hands with the stars!" To him fellowship with God seemed an impossible dream.

Paul was a devout Jew and he had already reached the highest levels of his ancestral religion (Philippians 3.4, 5; II Corinthians 11:21, 22). What was that way towards fellowship upon which Paul had struggled only to find that it was a dead end? It was the way of obedience to the Law.

We shall never go far in the study of Jewish religion without coming upon the idea of the covenant. The Jews believed, and rightly, that as a nation they were in a special relationship with God. That relationship they called the covenant relationship. A covenant is not a bargain, an agreement, a treaty, a contract, for in all such relationships the two parties come together on equal terms and with equal rights. The covenant was a relationship in which the whole initiative lay with God. God on his own initiative, not because of any merits of Israel, out of his own free grace, had come to Israel with the special offer that they would be his people arid he would be their God. But the covenant was not without its conditions; the privilege was not without its responsibilities. The condition was that Israel must accept and obey the Law which God gave them. In Exodus 243-8 we have a vivid picture of the people entering into this relationship with God. The culmination of the initiation came when Moses took the book of the Law and read it to the people and the people said: "All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient" (Exodus 24:7).

The immediate consequence of this was that the Law became the greatest reality in the religion of Israel. It came to be regarded as divine and pre-existent, as absolutely final and complete, as that part of Scripture to which the rest of Scripture was no more than commentary and addendum. It came to be traced back until it could be said that Adam was circumcised and kept the Sabbath and that Abraham and all the patriarchs kept the Law, as it were, by anticipation. It came even to be said that God himself studied the Law.

It has to be carefully remembered that the expression the Law has three meanings. First, it can mean the Ten Commandments, which are the Law par excellence. Second, it can mean the Pentateuch, the first five books of the O.T. which contain both the moral and the ceremonial law. Third, it can mean the Oral Law. In the beginning the Law had consisted of a series of great principles, such as, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." The Scribes and Rabbis throughout the ages had taken these great principles and had worked them out in the greatest possible detail. For instance, the Law said that a burden must not be carried on the Sabbath; the Scribes spent pages and chapters defining what a burden was, until it came to be argued whether a man was carrying a burden if he wore his dentures or a wooden leg on the Sabbath. According to the ceremonial law the hands must be washed at certain times; the Scribes spent hours defining just how much water must be used, just what the correct actions were. The Oral or Scribal Law took the great principles of the Law and made them into an infinity of rules and regulations. Law had become legalism. And it must always be remembered that it was not the great principles of the divine Law which Paul was against; it was the legalism of the endless details of the Scribal Law.

Clearly, the other side of the Law is obedience. The Jews were the people who had taken upon themselves "the yoke of the Law" (Sayings of the Fathers 3:8). Law is irrelevant unless it is meticulously obeyed. Two facts are to be noted about this obedience.

First, for the devout Jew this obedience was a joy and a glory. "The Law is my delight," said the Psalmist. "Oh, how I love thy law!" (Psalm 119:77, 97). The law was not the yoke of slavery; it was the yoke which a lover takes upon himself when he dedicates himself in devotion to obey the least command of his beloved.

Second, it is nonetheless true that this view of religion produces, or is liable to produce, the most serious consequences. If a relationship is dependent on the obedience to law, especially if that law is conceived of in terms of rules and regulations, the idea of merit inevitably enters in. The man who obeys the regulations acquires a credit balance; the man who fails to do so acquires a debit balance. In this relationship a man can work his passage. It is possible to speak of those who have been justified in their keeping of the Law (II Baruch 51:3, 4). Hezekiah the good king trusted in his works (II Baruch 63:3). There is even a treasury of works. The righteous have with God a store of works preserved in treasuries (II Baruch 14:12). The good man has a treasure of works laid up with the Most High (II Esdras 7:77).

This situation can result in one of two things which depend largely on the temperament of the person involved. It can result in spiritual pride. The more detailed the Law became, the more the opportunities arose to score credits and to acquire merit. And it became possible for a man of a certain type of mind to congratulate himself on the meticulous performance of the regulations of the Law, and even to think that he had succeeded in putting God in his debt. Hence pride and self-righteousness arise.

The second result is the precise opposite of this. A man could become agonized and tortured and frustrated and defeated when he allowed himself to think of the sinner's attempt to satisfy the sinless One, of humanity's hopeless struggle to set itself right with deity. Clearly, this is a struggle doomed to defeat, and can result only in a terrible estrangement, conscious for ever of being in default to God and under the judgment of God.

It was the second situation in which Paul found himself. No human being had ever striven harder and succeeded better in keeping the Law. As far as the righteousness which was in the Law was concerned he was blameless (Philippians 3:6). But the harder he strove the further he became from God. "No human being", he said, "will be justified in God's sight by works of the Law" (Romans 3:20; Galatians 3:11). "A man is not justified by works of the Law" (Galatians 2:16). Paul knew, because Paul had tried it.

And yet the curious thing is that to the end of the day Paul never discarded the Law, although when he speaks of the Law in this sense it is not the Scribal Law, but the great principles of the Divine Law which he has in mind. "Do we then overthrow the law by this faith ? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the Law" (Romans 3:31). The commandment is holy, just and good (Romans 7:12). What then is the use of the Law and the place of the Law in the new scheme of things?

1. Quite clearly, the Law defines sin. If it had not been for the Law, Paul would not have known what sin was (Romans 7:7). Where there is no Law, there can be no charge of sin (Romans 5:I3). Through the Law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20). To take a very simple example, in the early stages of the O.T. polygamy was practiced, but it was not yet wrong, for the divine law forbidding it was not yet known to men. There is a sense, a quite neutral sense, in which the Law creates sin. The Law came in to increase the trespass (Romans 5:20). To take an analogy, for long enough it may be quite legal to drive along a road in either direction; a regulation is passed making that road a one-way road; and immediately a new "sin", the sin of driving in the wrong direction, is thereby created. Certainly the Law is necessary to define sin.

2. But there is another sense in which the Law creates sin. Sin found its opportunity through the commandment (Romans 7:7-l1). It is a bitter fact of human experience that it often happens that no sooner is a thing forbidden than it becomes desirable. The very fact that it was forbidden to eat of the tree in the garden made Adam and Eve wish to eat it. The grass on the other side of the fence is always most succulent. The paradox and tragedy of the law is that it creates a desire for that which it forbids. Sin works in a man through that which is in itself good. So there arises a situation in which a man is consumed with desire for that which he knows is wrong and which one part of him does not wish to do, and a barrier is set up, stopping him doing what he really wishes to do. The Law has made him a split personality and a walking civil war (Romans 7:13-25).

3. Is then the Law totally wrong and useless? There are two things the Law can do.

(a) The Law shuts a man up under sin (Galatians 3:23). It compels him to see the slavery in which he lives. It compels him to fulfil the old Greek adage and to know himself. In this the Law is essential for the first step to freedom is to realize that we are slaves.

(b) The Law does more than that. It is, as the AV has it, our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). The word is paidagogos, and schoolmaster is not a good translation. The RSV has custodian; Weymouth, tutor slave; Moffatt has it that the Law held us wards in discipline; Kingsley Williams has the slave that disciplined us; the NLB, a kind of tutor in charge of us; Phillips has it that the Law is a strict governess. The fact is that the paidago gos had nothing to do with a boy's technical education. He did teach the boy manners and morals; and he did every day conduct the boy to the door of the schoolroom, and leave him there. He took him to school, but he never himself entered the school. He, as it were, handed him over and delivered him to the one who could teach him. So then the Law brings us to the door of Christ and leaves us there.

What does this mean? It can only mean that the Law drives us to complete despair. It shows us the good; it leaves us helpless to do it; it even wakens the desire to sin. Life is defeated and frustrated, arid there is nothing left to do but to come to Jesus Christ and accept what he has to give. The Law can take us so far, but only Jesus Christ can take us the whole way to God. What then is to be put in the place of Law?

Now we have arrived at the great Pauline conception of faith. Faith is a kaleidoscopic word, and we can only take the most summary view of it here.

1. Faith is loyalty. The faith of the Christians at Rome is proclaimed throughout the world (Romans 1:8). The faith of the Colossians and the Thessalonians is dear to Paul (Colossians 1:4; 1 Thessalonians 3.5). The Corinthians are to stand fast in the faith (I Corinthians 16:13). Man's faithlessness is contrasted with God's faith, God's reliability, God's loyalty to himself and to his promises and to his people (Romans 33). Faith is that loyalty which is the foundation stone of life and of religion.

2. Faith is a man's religion. The Christians were to find Paul preaching the faith he had once sought to obliterate (Galatians 1:23). The man who is weak in the faith must not be immediately introduced to debates about doubtful questions (Romans 14:1). We speak of the Christian faith in the sense of the Christian religion.

3. Faith is a creed, that in which a man believes and by which he is prepared to stand. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:5)

4. Faith comes from hearing. It is the result of listening in the right way to a message which is a challenge and a rebuke and an offer (Romans 10:17; Galatians 3:2).

5. It is now that we come to the distinctively Pauline sense of faith. Faith is committal to an adventure. We walk by faith and not by sight (II Corinthians 5:7). It is launching out into the deep, accepting the plunge into the unknown, "betting your life that there is a God". It is venturing for the name of Christ.

6. Faith is the trustful acceptance of an offer. It is by faith that the expiation of Christ must be received (Romans 3:25). It is the committal of all life in time and in eternity to the trust that the offer and promises of God in Christ Jesus are true. It is casting oneself without reservation on God in the complete confidence that he means what he says in Christ.

7. Faith is the willingness to admit one's own helplessness. This is the essence of the contrast between faith and works (Romans 3:28; 9:32). The man who believes in works thinks consciously or unconsciously that he can do something to save himself, something to put himself right with God; faith means the acceptance of the fact that a man can do nothing except humbly and trustfully accept what God offers him. Faith is the realization that man can only take.

8. Faith can only work through love and must change the frustration of life into the joy of life (Galatians 5:6; Ephesians 6:23; II Thessalonians 1:3; Philippians 1:25). It is neither the arid intellectualism which thinks only of the mind nor the gloom which is obsessed with sin. It is the kindled heart and the joyous spirit whose confidence is not in self but in God

For Paul faith is exemplified in Abraham (Romans 4; Galatians 3:6-18). Abraham was not justified by works of the Law, nor by circumcision, because he lived long before the Law was given, and his circumcision followed and did not precede the establishment of his relationship with God. Faith in Abraham was simply the willingness to take God at his word even if the word seemed impossible. It seemed humanly impossible that a man of a hundred years of age with a wife as old should have a child, yet Abraham believed that what God promised God would do. Abraham was the man who took God at his word, and that is faith.

Paul expresses this new relationship between God and man in a series of metaphors.

1. There is the metaphor from slavery and the idea of emancipation. The Christian has been bought with a great price (I Corinthians 6:20; 7:23); God has purchased the Church with the blood of his own One (Acts 20:28). It is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1).

In the Greek world it was possible for a slave to gain his freedom. He might during any free time he had work for a few coppers. Each time he earned some money he deposited it in the temple of some god. He might well have to go on doing this for many long years. When he had the total purchase price deposited, he took his master to the temple; the priest paid over the money; and then the slave became the property of the god and therefore free of all men. So Paul thinks of Jesus Christ as paying the purchase price, which brings a man into the possession of God, and from that time on a man is no longer the slave of sin but the servant of righteousness (Romans 6:14-23). Thus througb the price that Jesus Christ paid a man is liberated and emancipated from sin and becomes the property of God.

2. There is the metaphor from the family and the idea of adoption. Through Jesus Christ we have received the spirit of sonship or adoption (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:5, 6; Ephesians 1:5). We have become members of the family of God and can speak of God as Abba, Father.

 In the ancient world adoption was common, and in the Roman world it almost literally made a man a new man. All the obligations and debts of his past life were cancelled, and he became as really a son of his adopting father as any flesh and blood son was. He left behind him all the old debts and entered without restriction into all the new privileges.

3. There is the metaphor from friendship and the idea of reconciliation. We are reconciled to God by the death of his Son (Romans 5:10). God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (II Corinthians 5:18-20). The verb is katallassein and it is the regular Greek verb for effecting a re conciliation between two people who have quarrelled or drifted apart. Through Jesus Christ friendship between man and God is restored. But one thing must be noted -- it is always man who is reconciled to God, never God to man. It was not the attitude of God which had to be changed; that was always suffering, waiting, seeking love. It was man's heart which had to be changed so that the rebellion should become obedience and the fear should become trust.

4. There is the metaphor from sacrifice and the idea of propitiation. God put Jesus Christ forward as an expiation in his blood (Romans 3:25). We are here in the realm of the covenant again. We have seen that the existence of the covenant relationship depended on the keeping of the Law. Man being sinful the covenant relationship was bound to be broken. To meet that situation the whole sacrificial system was created. When a man broke the Law, he came with a sacrifice which was the sign and the symbol and the guarantee of his penitence, and thus the relationship was restored. It has to be noted that, whatever may have ultimately been the popular belief, the sacrifice was unavailing without the penitence of which it was the sign.

Sacrifice is therefore the way towards the restoration of the broken relationship between man and God in Jewish thought. So the life and death of Jesus Christ are the price at which man's relationship to God was restored. This sacrifice did not change the attitude of God, for, as we have seen, God never needed to be reconciled to man. The plea is: "Be reconciled to God" (II Corinthians 5:20). God's wrath never needed to be changed to love, for it was his love that God showed in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). It was God himself who in the wonder of his love thus reached out in the sufferings and death of his Son to touch the hearts of men.

5. There is the metaphor from the lawcourts and the idea of justification. It is here we reach the very heart of Paul's own faith, for here we reach the doctrine of Justification by Faith. No man can be justified by works; that Paul knew from bitter experience (Romans 3:20; Galatians 2:16; 3:11). A man is justified by faith and therein finds his peace with God (Romans 3:28; 5:1).

It is unfortunate that here the word justification is being used in a non-English and an unusual sense. Usually the verb to justify means to produce reasons why a person was right to act as he did. But when Paul says that God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5) it is clear that he cannot mean that God produces reasons to prove that the sinner was right to act as he did, and is right to be a sinner. In Greek the verb is dikaioun. Greek verbs which end in -oun, when they describe moral qualities, do not mean to make a man such and such a thing, they mean to treat, reckon. account, regard a man as such and such a thing. So when Paul speaks of God justifying the ungodly, quite simply he means that God treats the sinner as if he was a good man. In his amazing love God treats the hell-deserving sinner as a beloved son. The perfect example of Justification by Faith in action is the parable of the prodigal son. The son planned to come back and to ask to be received as a hired servant: he never got the chance to make the request; he is welcomed as a son (Luke 15:11-32). Here indeed is a Gospel. All that we could have expected is condemnation, and lo and behold we meet with welcoming love. The relationship between God and man is completely changed. We can now think of God not as the threatening judge but as the waiting father, and we can come to him in heart-broken penitence but nonetheless in childlike confidence and trust.

If every time we meet the word justification we translate it to come into a right relationship with God, the whole matter becomes clear. No human being can ever enter into a right relationship with God through works of the Law (Romans 3:20). Since through faith we are in a right relationship with God we have peace with him through Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1).

Why by faith? Because all this sounds too good to be true, and all that we can do is to make the act of trust which accepts it as true, and which in that trust comes to God. Why through Jesus Christ? Because apart from Jesus Christ and without him no man could ever have discovered that God is like this.

The other name for all this is grace. Grace is something which a man can never earn, but which is freely and spontaneously given to him, and which he can only accept. The essence of the Pauline faith is the acceptance of the fact that we cannot save ourselves, but that we can only trustingly and lovingly accept that which God so generously offers.

But the matter cannot be left there. It would be posssible to interpret all that we have so far seen as a reason for holding that sin does not matter any more. If God treats the sinner as a good man, why worry about sin any more ? If grace is all-important, and if man must stop striving and start receiving, why not simply relax all discipline and let desire have full play? In point of fact this is precisely the argument that Paul had to meet, and we shall meet it again in other parts of the NT. Behind the questions in Romans 6:1 there is a hidden conversation. "What shall we then say? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" The argument runs like this.

The Questioner: You say that grace can forgive any sin? Paul: I do.

The Questioner: You say that grace is the greatest and loveliest thing in the world?

Paul: I do.

The Questioner: Then, if that be so, let us go on sinning to our heart's content, for the more we sin the more this tremendous grace receives its opportunity to operate. All that it does is to provide an opportunity for the grace of God.

To that Paul would have returned three answers.

1. What Christianity does is not to supply a man with an excuse comfortably to live the old life; it supplies him with a dynamic for the new life. That new life which comes with baptism is a sharing in the resurrection life of Christ. In it a man has died to sin and lives to God; he is no longer the slave of sin but the servant of righteousness (Romans 6:3-19). The whole essence of Christianity is not that it makes a man free to sin, but that it makes him free not to sin.

2. If a man takes up that attitude he does not know what love is. The fact that our nearest and dearest love us and will love us and will forgive us no matter what we do is not a reason for doing the things which will break their hearts; so far from that it lays upon us the responsibility of for ever seeking to deserve that love. To know that we are loved, and to know that love will forgive, is not a reason for licence; it is the obligation to nobility.

3. The Pauline idea of justification is incomplete without the accompanying idea of sanctification. When the Christian is freed from sin and becomes the slave of God, the return he receives is sanctification (Romans 6:22). The sanctification of the Christian is the will of God (I Thessalonians 4:3). It is Paul's prayer for the Thessalonians that the God of peace may sanctify his people wholly (I Thessalonians 5:23). Christians are chosen for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit (II Thessalonians 2:13).

What is this sanctification? The word for sanctification is hagiasmos; Greek nouns which end in - asmos signify not an act but a process; and sanctification is the road to holiness, and it is precisely that road that the Christian must for ever walk. Take an analogy. Suppose there is a locomotive which must pull a train from London to Glasgow. It is facing in the wrong direction. It is taken to the turn-table and turned round. But then after that it must begin on the long journey to its appointed destination. Conversion, justification, the moment when we turn round and face God in the new relationship, instead of running away from him, is like the turning on the turn-table. Sanctification is like the long road which has to be made to the journey's end. Paul would certainly have said that a man is not saved by works; but he would equally have said that a man is saved for works. And unless sanctification follows justification, unless a moral change accompanies the new relationship to God, a man's Christianity is sadly incomplete.

But there is this one difference. The motive power is not now law but love. The constraint now is the love of Christ (II Corinthians 5:14). The dynamic is not now fear, but devotion to the Saviour who loved us and gave himself for us. Life has become a response to love, and has laid upon it the awesome responsibility of being loved.

When all this happens, then life is in Christ, a phrase which occurs in Paul's letters more than eighty times. It has been said that the only possible analogy to this phrase is in our relationship to the air which surrounds us. Unless we are in the air, and unless the air is in us, we die. And unless the Christian is in Christ and Christ in the Christian the spiritual life dies. Christ is the very atmosphere in which the Christian lives and moves and has his being, the standard by which he judges all things, the voice for which he continually listens, the presence who is always and for ever with him in life and in death.

Chapter 3: John

The Gospel of the Word

To very many people the Fourth Gospel is the high-water mark of the NT. "Chiefest of the Gospels," Luther called it, "unique, tender and true." Very early in the history of the Church the four living creatures of the Revelation (4:7) were used as the symbols of the Gospels. The allocation of them varies, but according to Augustine the man stands for Mark, who gives us the most human picture of Jesus; the lion stands for Matthew, who shows us Jesus as the Messiah, the lion of Judah; the ox stands for Luke, for the ox is the animal of sacrifice, and Luke shows us Jesus as the sacrifice and the Saviour for the sins of the world; and the eagle stands for John, "because John took a higher flight, and soared in his preaching much more sublimely than the other three" (Homilies on John, 36). It is said that only the eagle of all living creatures can look straight into the sun; so John looks more directly into the blaze of divine truth than any other of the Gospel writers. Certain things have to be noted about John.

1. John did not write until almost An 100. His Gospel is, therefore, the product of long thought and of long living with Jesus and of long experience of the Spirit. W. M. Macgregor has a sermon entitled What Jesus becomes to a man who has known him long, and that is an excellent descrip- tion of John's Gospel. John was more concerned with the meaning of the facts of Jesus' life than with the facts themselves. It is in John that we get the highest teaching of the Spirit. "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16. 12, 13). For John that promise had come true; he saw things that only years in the Spirit could teach; and his Gospel may well be called the Gospel of the Sprit.

2. All tradition has it that John did not write alone. The account of the writing of the Fourth Gospel in the Muratorian Canon, the earliest list of the books of the NT, cannot be factually correct, but it is certainly true in principle: "When his fellow-disciples and bishops urged John (to write)", he said: "Fast together with me for three days, and let us tell to each other what shall be revealed to each one of us." On the same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that, with all of them reviewing it, John should describe all things in his own name. "The picture is that of a group sitting in the Spirit and remembering and saying to each other: "You remember what Jesus said. . . and now we know that this is what he meant." In John we have the product of what happens when two or three are gathered together in the name of Jesus (Matthew 18.20).

3. John was confronted with a different problem from that of the other Gospel writers. They had been Jews writing in Jewish terms largely for Jews, or for those brought up in the Jewish tradition; but John was in Ephesus and he had to find some way of expressing the truth of the Gospel in a way that a Greek could understand. To call Jesus Son of David or even Messiah would be to a Greek quite unintelligible. John found his new way in the conception of Jesus as the Logos, the Word. This conception has three advantages.

(a) It has a universal background. In any circumstances a word is two things. First, a word is the expression of a thought. We think and then we express the thought in words. So then to call Jesus the Word is to call him the expression of the thought of God. Second, a word is a means of communication. Therefore, to call Jesus the Word is to say that he is the person and the means whereby God communicates with men.

(b) It has a Jewish background. To a Jew a word was not simply a sound in the air. A word was a thing which did things; it was an effective unit of energy. A word did not only say things; it did things. If that is true of a human word, how much more it must be true of the divine word. The word of God does not return void and ineffective; it does what God designed it to do (Isaiah 55:11) The word of God is like a hammer that breaks the rocks in pieces (Jeremiah 23.29). By the word of God the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6-9). Every act of creation begins, "And God said . . ." (Genesis 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). So then to say that Jesus is the word of God is to say that he is the dynamic, creative power of God in action.

Here we have to insert into the pattern another basic fact. Logos does not only mean word; it also means reason. There is in fact no English term which covers both these meanings, and that is why Moffatt in his translation does not attempt to translate it, but simply says: "The Logos became flesh." Now in Judaism another idea became increasingly common, the place of Wisdom, Sophia, in the work and design of God. In Proverbs 8:22-31 Wisdom is there from the beginning, and before the beginning, the master workman who was God's agent in the creation of the world. This is still further developed in the inter-testamental Wisdom literature. Wisdom was present at creation and was the instrument of God's creating work (Wisdom 9:1, 2, 9). Wisdom is nothing else than the breath of the power of God, and the clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty (Wisdom 7:25). Here again we have the idea of Reason, Wisdom, Logos, Sophia as the creative power and energy of God, existing before the world began.

(c) It has a Greek background. In Greek thought the Logos had a very special function. The Greek thinkers were impressed by the diversity of the universe, and by the principle of change and alteration which obviously operates within it. But they were also deeply impressed by the dependability of the universe, by the fact that this is a reliable universe with a pattern and a plan in it, in which all things follow in their appointed order and in which a cause always produces the same effect. So they asked, what keeps the stars in their courses, what makes the sun rise and set, what brings back the seasons in their appointed order, what is it that puts mind into man? Their answer was that this is the work of the Logos, the mind of God operating in the world. So then to call Jesus the Logos is to say that he is the mind of God, become a flesh and blood human creature. It is as if John said: "For centuries you have been speaking and thinking about the Logos, the mind of God, and you have been tracing the Logos in the structure of the universe. If you want to see the mind of God full displayed, look at Jesus."

(d) One final piece has to be fitted into the pattern. Almost at the same time as Jesus and Paul there lived in Alexandria a great Jewish thinker called Philo; he knew Jewish thought and he knew Greek thought as no one else has ever known both. He was the bridge between them. In his voluminous works there are no fewer than six hundred references to the Logos, and basically they all have the same essential thought. God is high and lifted up, utterly transcendent. He cannot himself communicate directly with sinful man. His means of communication, his liaison with the world is the Logos. "The Father, who has begotten all things, granted as his choicest privilege to the chief messenger and most august Logos that he should stand in the midst between the created and the Creator." So to say that Jesus is the Logos is to say that he is God's supreme means of communication with men.

So then all these lines converge on the one thought that the Logos, with its double meaning of word and reason, is the expression of the mind of God, and the power of God in action. In Jesus we see in human action the mind of God.

Let us now turn to the Prologue, the first 18 verses of the Fourth Gospel to see what John has to say about Jesus as the Logos. We find that he has five things to say.

1. He tells us what Jesus personally was. He begins with a brief statement which provides the translator with a problem not far from insoluble in the English language. "The Word", say both the AV and the RSV, "was God" (John 1:1). Moffatt is one of the few modern translators who dare to depart from that rendering. "The Logos", he translates, "was divine." In a matter like this we cannot do other than go to the Greek, which is theos en ho logos. Theos is the Greek for God, en for was, ho for the, logos for word. Now normally, except for special reasons, Greek nouns always have the definite article in front of them, and we can see at once here that theos the noun for God has not got the definite article in front of it. When a Greek noun has not got the article in front of it, it becomes rather a description than an identification, and has the character of an adjective rather than of a noun. We can see exactly the same in English. If I say: "James is the man", then I identify James with some definite man whom I have in mind; but, if 1 say: "James is man", then I am simply describing James as human, and the word man has become a description and not an identification. If John had said ho theos en ho logos, using a definite article in front of both nouns, then he would definitely have identified the logos with God, but because he has no definite article in front of theos it becomes a description, and more of an adjective than a noun. The translation then becomes, to put it rather clumsily, "The Word was in the same class as God, belonged to the same order of being as God". The only modern translator who fairly and squarely faced this problem is Kenneth Wuest, who has: "The Word was as to his essence essential deity." But it is here that the NEB has brilliantly solved the problem with the absolutely accurate rendering: "What God was the Word was."

John is not here identifying the Word with God. To put it very simply, he does not say that Jesus was God. What he does say is that no human description of Jesus can be adequate, and that Jesus, however you are going to define it, must be described in terms of God. "I know men," said Napoleon, "and Jesus Christ is more than a man."

But no sooner has John presented us with a problem in translation than he presents us with a problem in theology. "In the beginning", he says, "was the Word." "He was in the beginning with God" (John 1:1, 2). Here we come upon the doctrine which is known as the doctrine of the preexistence of the Word, or the pre-existence of the Son. There is no more difficult doctrine to understand in all theological thinking. It quite clearly cannot mean that this flesh and blood man Jesus existed before the creation of the world. What then does it mean?

We do not say that in what follows there is anything like a full account of the meaning of the pre-existence of the Son or of the Word, but, whatever else that doctrine may or may not mean, it does mean this. Let us remind ourselves what John basically means when he called Jesus the Word; he meant that in Jesus we see perfectly displayed in human form the mind of God. To put it at its very simplest, he meant that God is like Jesus. This means that, when we see Jesus feeding the hungry and healing the sick and being the friend of outcasts and sinners, when we see Jesus dying on the Cross, we can say: "God is like that." Now, if we go on to speak of the pre-existence of the Logos, one thing at least that we must mean is that God was always like that. The mind of God, the attitude of God towards men, was always from all eternity to all eternity that which we see in Jesus.

To grasp this is of the most crucial importance. There are certain ways of speaking about Jesus which imply, or even come near to stating, that Jesus did something to change the attitude of God to men, that somehow Jesus changed God's wrath into love, that somehow Jesus persuaded God to hold his hand and to pacify his anger to withhold his judgment of condemnation, that, to put it very crudely, Jesus by his sufferings and his death bought off God. It is perfectly possible to speak in such a way as to leave an impression of an opposition and a contrast between Jesus and God. Jesus is presented as forgiving love; God is presented as awful holiness; and Jesus is depicted as winning forgiveness for men from God.

But, if we insist that the Logos was in the beginning and before the beginning, it means very simply that God was always like Jesus and always will be, and that Jesus did not come to change the attitude of God to men, but to show quite unmistakably what that attitude is and always was.

2. John goes on to tell us what Jesus did. "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:3). The Word, the Son, Jesus is thus connected with the creation of the world, which for a modern mind has always been a difficult idea, and yet an idea integral to NT thought. "By him", says Paul, "all things were created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible" (Colossians 1:16). The writer to the Hebrews speaks of the Son by whom God made the worlds (Hebrews 1:2). Paul speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things (I Corinthians 8:6).

The connection of the Word, the Son, with creation was an idea which arose to combat a certain heresy which we shall meet again as we study other NT books. In the Graeco- Roman world there was a type of thought which goes by the general name of Gnosticism. Gnosticism sought to explain the evil in the world by means of a thorough-going dualism. It said that from all eternity there has been in the world two realities, Spirit, which is God, and matter. Spirit and matter are co-eternal. Matter is the stuff, the raw material, out of which the world is made, and from the beginning matter is essentially flawed and imperfect. This is to say that the world is made out of bad stuff. Since matter is bad the God who is pure spirit cannot touch it. He therefore put out a series of aeons or emanations, each one a little more distant from himself, stretching like a kind of ladder between himself and matter. The further the series descended, the further the emanation was from God, the more ignorant of God it was. As the series still further descended, to ignorance there was added hostility; and so at the end of the series there is an aeon, the Demiurge, the World-fashioner, who is utterly ignorant of, and totally hostile to, the true God who is spirit, and by that power the world was created. Creation is essentially evil because it was carried out by an ignorant, hostile, inferior deity working with flawed and imperfect material. Given the premises, it is a perfectly logical explanation of the presence of evil in the world.

The Christian answer is No; creation is not the work of a hostile, bungling, ignorant power; it is the work of the Logos, the Word, the Son. Now let us see what this practically means.

Let us again remind ourselves who the Logos is -- the Logos is the perfect expression of the mind of God. In the kindness and the graciousness and the love of Jesus we see God in action. If then the Logos is the agent of creation it means that the principle which is in the created world is the same principle as is in Jesus Christ. It means that the God of creation and the God of redemption are one and the same; it means that the love which is in redemption is in creation also.

There are times when only the clinging to that principle prevents the complete collapse of faith. There are times when life seems our enemy. Pain may agonize the body and sorrow may bring anguish to the mind; wave upon wave of disaster may engulf life. But, if we believe that the principle of creation and the principle of redemption are the same, then we can be absolutely sure that life is out to make us and not to break us, that "it means intensely and means good", and we too can say: "God, thou art love, I build my faith on that." The idea of the Christ of creation is not merely a cosmological speculation: it is also many a time the stay and the refuge of the broken heart.

3. Jesus goes on to tell us what Jesus became. "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14). To John's readers this must have seemed the most startling statement in the whole Gospel. Augustine, who was a very great classical scholar, said in his Confessions (6:9) that he had found in the great classical thinkers some kind of parallel for everything in the Gospels except this one statement, "The Word became flesh."

For a Gnostic the body is clearly essentially evil, for the body is matter. But apart from Gnosticism there was in Graeco-Roman thought a profound belief that the one thing to be desired was to be rid of the body. Soma sema ran the Orphic jingle, "The body is a tomb". The body, said Philolaus, is a house of detention in which the soul is imprisoned to expiate its sin. Philosophy, said Plato. is the study of dying; to have a body is to be contaminated with evil; the body is a prison-house and death the only release (Phaeda 64-67). Epictetus described himself as a poor soul shackled to a corpse (Fragment 23). Seneca spoke of the detestable habitation of the body (Letters 92:110). That God could in any sense take upon himself a body was to the Greek incredible. We shall later, when we are studying John's letters, see how this conception drifted into the Church and threatened disastrous consequences to the Christian faith. At the moment it is enough to say this, no Christian can ever despise the body, for God himself took this human flesh upon him.

4. John goes on to say what Jesus gives. As John sees it, Jesus gives three things.

(a) Jesus gives life. This is the statement which is the beginning the middle and the end of the Fourth Gospel. The Gospel begins: "In him was life" (1:4). In the middle Jesus claims that he came to give life and life more abundant (10:10). The Gospel ends with the statement that it was written to enable men to believe in Jesus Christ and to have life through his name (20:31).

This life is eternal life. The word for eternal is aionios, which means far more than life which lasts indefinitely, for quite clearly mere prolongation of life might be the supreme punishment and curse. Aionios in Greek is a word of mystery; there is only one person to whom it may properly be applied and that one person is God. Eternal life is nothing other than the life of God. The gift of Jesus Christ here and now is a foretaste of the life divine.

(b) Jesus gives light. He is the true light (1:9). The word for true is here alethinos, which means real or genuine, as opposed to that which is substitute and counterfeit. Jesus is the real light. Other lights flicker and die, mislead and seduce; he alone is the light which is real and which leads to reality.

(c) Jesus gives the new birth (1:12, 13). The change he works is so radical that it cannot be called anything less than a new birth. In him life begins again, and in him the coward becomes the hero, the sinner becomes the saint, and the man of the world becomes the man of God.

5. Lastly, John tells us what Jesus suffered. He came to his own world and the world did not know him; he came to his own home and his people refused to receive him (1:10, 11). Here is the tragedy of the glory offered, and the glory refused.

To John the supreme fact about Jesus is that Jesus is the perfect expression of the mind of God. We can be quite certain that God cares and God shares. Of whom, then, shall we be afraid?

Chapter 2: The Synoptic Gospels

The Gospel of the Kingdom

The Synoptic Gospels by Mark, Matthew and Luke leave us in no doubt concerning the message with which Jesus came. Jesus came preaching the Gospel of God: "The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the Gospel" (Mark 1:15).

Here is the conception of the Kingdom. This was not a new conception, but it was a fluid conception. To a Pharisee the Kingdom was a time when men would perfectly obey the Law. "If Israel would only keep the Law perfectly for one day the Kingdom would come." On the whole the Sadducees were not much interested in the Kingdom; their main preoccupation was to keep things as they were, so that by a policy of prudent collaboration they might retain their wealth and their political influence. The quiet in the land thought of the Kingdom in terms of quiet devotion to God, in prayer to him, waiting for him, and communion with him. No doubt the great mass of the people thought of the Kingdom in terms of national deliverance, liberation and power. They could cite the prophets.

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, And they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine. (Isaiah 49:26).

For the nation and the kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste. (Isaiah 60.12)

With the conception of the Kingdom there was indissolubly connected the idea of the Messiah, the champion of God who would deliver the people of God; and Jesus accepted the confession of faith of Peter at Caesarea Philippi: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16.16, NEB). Again the idea of the Messiah was fluid, and might mean either a mighty human champion of David's line, or a divine supernatural figure unleashed by God in irresistible might upon the world.

Still further, and again inextricably connected with the Kingdom and the Messiah, was the conception of the Day of the Lord. It was the increasing conviction of the Jews that things had come to such a pass that the Kingdom could never come by human means. They therefore divided time into two ages, this present age, which is wholly and incurably bad, and the age to come, which is the blessed age of God. The time between was the Day of the Lord when God would suddenly and shatteringly break into the world in cosmos-destroying power and judgment, and in which the old world would be completely destroyed and the new world born.

Into this complex of ideas Jesus came, and he came preaching the Kingdom. The word kingdom tends to mean to us an area of land ruled over by a king; in the NT the word rather means the Reign of God. It describes not an area of territory but the universal sovereignty of God. The odd thing is that Jesus never defined the Kingdom. We can be perfectly sure that he did not think of in terms of the observance of the Law or in terms of national empire. How then did he think of it? He taught men to pray:

Thy Kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

(Matthew 6.10)

If we apply to that the principle of Hebrew parallelism in which the second arm of the two parallel phrases reiterates or explains the first, then we can say that the Kingdom is a society upon earth in which God's will is as perfectly done as it is in heaven. And this makes good sense, for any kingdom is both an area and a society in which the king's word is law. If this be so, it sets us at once in two relationships.

1.It sets us in a relationship to God; and that relationship is obedience. If we then equate the membership of the Kingdom with the acceptance of the will of God, we find that the Kingdom is worth everything a man has to give (Matthew 13:.44, 45). The acceptance of the will of God is worth any sacrifice, however surgical, that a man may be called upon to make (Mark 9.43-48). For the Christian the most important thing in the universe is the will of God. Only when he accepts that will is he in the Kingdom.

2. But clearly, the citizens of a kingdom are not only in a relationship to their king, they are also in a relationship to each other. So membership of the Kingdom demands a certain attitude to our fellow men.

(a) It demands a certain usefulness. Uselessness invites disaster (Luke 13.6-9), and the failure to use the talents God has given brings judgment (Matthew 25.14-30). So far from detaching a man from the world the Kingdom sets him firmly In it.

(b) It demands an attitude of mercy. It is only the merciful who will receive mercy (Matthew 5.7), and only the forgiving who can be forgiven (Matthew 18.23-35). So far from equipping a man with a consciously superior and intolerant goodness the Kingdom must equip a man with a sympathy as wide as the world.

(c) We may put this more widely. Membership of the Kingdom means the deepest possible involvement in the human situation (Matthew 25.31-46). Citizenship of the Kingdom involves a new sense of responsibility; it joins a man as firmly to his fellow-men as it joins him to God.

(d) All this means to say that the law of the Kingdom is love. The watchword of the Kingdom is that untranslatable word agape, that unconquerable benevolence, that determination to seek nothing but the highest good of all men, that reflection of God's attitude to men.

In the Kingdom love of God and love of men go hand in hand. Obedience to God is paramount and no fine words can ever be a substitute for it (Matthew 7.21-23); involvement with men is essential and no one who passes by on the other side can be a member of the Kingdom (Luke 10.29-37).

In the Synoptic Gospels the Kingdom is conceived of in a double way. It is conceived of as a growth. It is a slow, steady, unseen growth, developing not by the effort of man, but by the power of God (Mark 4.26-29; Matthew 13.33). In this sense the Kingdom might well be called the product of the power and Spirit of God at work in the world and in the minds and hearts of men. But it is also conceived of as a consummation (Matthew 24; Mark 13). It is not, as it were, a growth which will never be anything else but a growth; it is a growth moving towards a consummation in which at last the will of God will be done not partially but completely, and in which the kingdoms of the world will become the Kingdom of God. Quite inevitably that involves judgment, for where there must be obedience there can be disobedience, and where there is a king who lays claim to the world there must be rebels who refuse his claim.

Wherein then is Jesus' place within this Kingdom? First and foremost, Jesus is the Kingdom, Jesus embodied the Kingdom. If the Kingdom is a state and condition of things in which the will of God is perfectly accepted and done, then Jesus is the only person in the universe who perfectly accepted that will. The thread that binds the life of Jesus together is his continual acceptance of the will of God. At the beginning and the end of his life on earth we see him accepting that will. In the temptation story (Matthew 4:1-I I; Luke 4.1-13) we see him accepting that way which can end only in the Cross. In Gethsemane (Matthew 26.36-46; Mark 14.32-42; Luke 22.39-46) we see him still accepting this will. In Jesus the Kingdom actually and in fact did come. To look at him is to see life in the Kingdom.

But the Synoptic Gospels do not leave the matter there. If this was all that we could say, then there could descend on the human spirit nothing but blank despair, for all that this does is to present us with a picture of the impossible. The necessary obedience is something that no man can ever bring, and to think of the Kingdom in terms of obedience is to think of it in terms of judgment which no man could escape. It would be in fact to make law the moving and dominating conception in the Kingdom.

When we lay down obedience as the principle of the Kingdom, when we lay down as the all-important decision the acceptance of the will of God, we are immediately faced with another question. What is the attitude behind that will of God? What is the character, what is the heart, of which that will is the expression? If that will is heartless, if that will is tyrannical and capricious, if that will is harsh and even cruel, then it may have to be accepted, but the acceptance can only be the act of a man who knows that he is crushed into helplessness and can do no other. He may accept it, but his acceptance will be either the acceptance of defeated resignation or rebellious resentment. That cannot be so, because Jesus came preaching the Gospel of God and urging men to repent and believe in the Gospel, and the Gospel is literally Good News (Mark 1:14, 15). What, then, is this Good News?

It is Good News about God, and it is summed up in the name which Jesus taught men to use to God, and the name by which he taught men to think of God. That name is Father. It is more than that; it is Abba (Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). This is the name by which a little child called his father in the home-circle in Palestine, as jaba still is in Arabic today. It is the name the picture of which is drawn in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), which would be far better called the parable of the loving Father. It is quite true that in the OT God is called the father of the nation and even the father of the king; but nowhere is there this individualized fatherhood which Jesus taught us is the supreme characteristic of God.

The very name changes the whole atmosphere. So long as we think in terms of a kingdom we have to think in terms of a king; and in the conception of kingship there is always something remote and distant and withdrawn. It is only to very few that it can ever be given to be on intimate terms with a king, or who can hope to have at any time unhindered access to the presence of the king. But as soon as the word father is mentioned the picture changes from that of a kingdom to a family; and thereby our relationship to God is completely changed. The essence of the divine-human relationship becomes not law but love. Sin becomes not a breaking of God's law but a breaking of God's heart. The desire of the penitent sinner becomes not flight from the king and judge but return to the father who waits in patient love. The very essence of this relationship is expressed in Jesus' lamentation over Jerusalem: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not" (Matthew 23:37). There speaks the voice, not of outraged majesty, not of insulted law, but of yearning love.

And where does Jesus come into this in the thought of the Synoptic Gospels? He comes into it in a double way.

1. Apart from Jesus men could never have known that God is like this. It was easy and natural and instinctive to think of him as King and Judge; it was far too good to be true to think of him as waiting and yearning love. Jesus is the Son of God; and, whatever else that may mean, and however else that relationship may be defined, it certainly does mean that the relationship between Jesus and God is so close and essential and intimate that Jesus can tell men what God is really like. There is no need to guess and grope any more. Jesus knows what God is like, because he is the Son of the Father -- and the message he brings is Good News.

2.But there is more to it than that. It would be easy to sentimentalize this conception of God, and to persuade oneself in consequence of it that sin does not matter; but the God who is Father does not cease to be the God who is Judge and King, and the God who is loving does not cease to be the God who is holy. Sin, therefore, matters intensely and cannot be waved aside as if it had never existed.

Now if a Jew was to think on these lines at all, and with all his heritage he could not avoid doing so, he was bound to think in terms of sacrifice, for it was through penitence expressed in terms of sacrifice that sin could be forgiven. The Synoptic Gospels, therefore, think of Jesus as making the sacrifice of his life for the sins of the world. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). "The Son of Man came . . . to give his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10.45). It would not have entered the minds of the early preachers to discuss to whom the sacrifice was made and to whom the ransom was paid; they would simply have been firm and immovable in the conviction that it cost the death of Jesus to make it possible for men to come back home to the family of God.

The Synoptic Gospels tell of the Good News of the Kingdom. The Kingdom means the Reign of the will of God. That Reign grows steadily but there is "one divine far off event to which the whole creation moves". Jesus revealed God as Father, and therefore a Father's will can be willingly and humbly and trustfully accepted, even if the cost of acceptance be very great. And the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the Cross dealt finally with the sin of man, and made it possible for man, the prodigal son, to enter again into the family circle of the God, who is the loving Father and the holy King.

Chapter 1: Many Ways To God

That great teacher and saint A. J. Gossip used to have a favorite saying. Often he would say that there are not four Gospels but five. There are the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and there is the Gospel according to a man's own experience -- and the fifth is the most important of all. It was not enough for the disciples to be able to tell Jesus what others said and thought of him. The basic and essential and all-important question was: "You -- who do you say that I am?" (Matthew 16.13-16). A man may be an expert able to pass an examination on all Christologies ancient and modern, but the real question is not what Jesus Christ meant to Irenaeus or Origen, Anselm or Aquinas, Luther or Calvin, Ritschl or Macleod Campbell, Barth or Aulen, but: "What does the Gospel mean to you?" God does not treat men as mass-produced, identical repetitions one of another: he treats men as individuals, no two of whom are alike. "God", as it has been said, "has his own secret stairway into every heart." "There are as many ways to the stars as there are men to climb them." "God", as Tennyson said, "fulfils himself in many ways."

In what follows we shall go on to think of the Gospel in the Synoptic Gospels, in John, in Paul, in Peter, in James, in Hebrews, in the letters of John, in II Peter and in Jude, and in the Revelation; but it is of the first importance to remember that we are not dealing with a series of Gospels competing with one another for our allegiance. The different expressions of the Gospel are not competing and antithetic: they are cooperative and complementary

Although we do not mean ourselves to use the classification, it is of interest to note that it has been said that broadly speaking there are four different types of religion presented in the NT.

1. There is the conception of religion as inward fellowship with God, resulting in a union so close that the believer can speak of himself as in Christ, and can say that it is no longer he who lives but Christ who lives in him. That is the characteristic experience of Paul.

2. There is the conception of religion as a right way of life, a right standard of living, and the inspiration to attempt, and the power to reach, that kind of life. That is the characteristic experience of James and Peter.

3. There is the conception of religion as the highest satisfaction of a man's mind, the truth to which he reaches out, and which by the help of the Spirit of Cod he grasps, and in which he rests. That is the characteristic experience of John.

4. There is the conception of religion as access and approach to God, in which a man enters out of the shadows into the light, out of the passing things of time into eternity, out of the world into the presence of God. That is the characteristic experience of the writer to the Hebrews.

It may well be that there are two things to which we do not ordinarily attach enough importance.

1. There is the effect of a man's personal experience of life upon his religion. It is always true that we only grasp those parts of the truth which we are compelled to grasp. There are things which we know well enough with our minds, but which only the compulsion of experience can make part of our very lives. I do not think, for instance, that the idea of the life beyond death ever becomes vividly and intensely real to us until someone we loved has died. Clearly, there will be a difference between the experience of the man who from his childhood days has known and loved Jesus, who has never had any real doubts, who has never, so to speak, been away from home, and the experience of the man to whom Jesus Christ is a new discovery, who has wandered in the deserts of infidelity, who has stained and blotted his life, who has been in the far countries of the soul. It is out of experience that faith is born, and a man's experience will colour his faith.

2. There is the effect of a man's temperament on his religion. There are those who are by nature placid and even lethargic, and there are tempestuous beings whose passions are at white heat and whose temper is on a hair trigger. There are those who are constitutionally disposed to accept things and to whom the blue waters never call, and there are those who must understand or perish and who must ever adventure on the uncharted seas of thought. Clearly, the difference in temperament will beget a difference in the experience of religion.

There is a word which the NT uses to describe the grace of God, the word poikilos (I Peter 4.10); the AV translates it manifold; the RSV and the NEB translate it varied. It really means many- coloured; and the idea is that there is no colour in the human situation which the grace of God cannot match. Whatever be a man's experience, whatever he a man's temperament, Jesus Christ has that which can meet man's need.

This is the thought with which this book is written. We have of late years heard much about the unity of the NT, and to that we will in the end come; but there is a strong case for thinking sometimes of the diversity of the NT. We are not seeking to present the NT as a series of contradictory and competing Gospels; we are trying to se how those who wrote it were witnessing to what Jesus Christ meant to them so that we may be moved to see what Jesus Christ means to us.

Appendix: Mercy for Miss Awdy, In a Vile Acting of the Sacred by Walter D. Love

Note: The late Walter D. Love was Associate Professor of History at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

A Dissolution of the Many into One Act (Which is Indubitably an Epiphany of Eternal Being, Immanent in that Act, which is History, but which inevitably shatters History, and is thus Dialectically Transcendent, and so on. -- To be continued in the program notes for other deep and radically contemporary plays, such as Biblical Scatology and Old Rented Mistresses, etc.)

Scene:

Arena University. Professor Oldteaser’s office, a dim room of the Freud Building. Upon the walls are prints of Chinese tapestries, visions of Hell, Dionysian orgies, and a number of pink and fleshy nudes. Among the books, all of which either wear their contemporary paper jackets or are recent paper-backs, on the shelves that climb the walls, are displayed plastic reproductions of such things as a Tibetan prayer wheel, African masks, a cross or two, a grinning gargoyle, several Indian-temple loving couples, and (standing in a corner) a crosier. There are also stones of various sizes, shapes, and colors, several Coca-Cola bottles, and many other objects sacred and symbolic. All are entirely new and wholly relevant.

The play takes place in deeply modern times.

The Professor is at his desk, squatting on his swivel chair in a Yoga posture (asana), concentrating on a single point, the "0" key on his typewriter. There is a knock at the door, which the Professor acknowledges, having put his feet down on the floor. The door opens, and Modern Woman is manifest. She bursts into tears.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, Professor Oldteaser, I am profoundly disturbed about your class, Bible 101. You have destroyed my faith.

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! Sit down and tell me about it, Miss Awdy.

MODERN WOMAN: [Sobbing] I’ve begun to see that you are right. God died.

OLDTEASER: Yes. God is dead. That is what Nietzsche has taught us. He is the greatest prophet of the modern world. God is dead (Gott ist tot) -- the German, you know. Theological language. It is very important to find the words relevant to our times. So many English words aren’t.

MODERN WOMAN: I see. I do admire the way you use all the languages, Western and Eastern. But [still sobbing], I think I’m losing my mind.

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! How do you know?

MODERN WOMAN: [Now calmer] Well, I keep having these funny little experiences of . . . I don’t know what to call them . . . I don’t know how to describe them . . . I just feel unreal.

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! Don’t you know what all the greatest contemporary writers, without exception, have taught us?

MODERN WOMAN: Something you told us in class?

OLDTEASER: Yes. They have taught us that when you feel the most unreal, why then obviously you are most in contact with the profoundest reality.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh? But that isn’t what it feels like to me. I feel like nothing is real and feel unreal myself. What’s that you say over and over in class -- "wholly other"? That’s it. That’s what happens to me; I go along all right, and then all of a sudden I feel wholly other all over.

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! That is precisely what is to be expected in our times. Especially at the moment when it becomes wholly manifest to Modern Man -- or Woman -- that it is existentially true that God is dead (Gott ist tot). You are just where Modern Man -- or Woman -- must be, Miss Awdy; in order to begin. You must deny God in order to affirm him.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh? Why must I do that?

OLDTEASER: Well, it is not enough to deny him by wondering vaguely whether he exists or not. Lots of students do that, and start taking classes in philosophy. You can study the proofs for the existence of God -- ontological, cosmological, scatological, and so on -- but they are not wholly relevant. You must deny God radically.

MODERN WOMAN: Radically?

OLDTEASER: Yes, radically. It is very important to do everything radically. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing radically. Go all the way.

MODERN WOMAN: I quite often do.

OLDTEASER: Well, yes. But now you must deny God by saying he is dead. Say it existentially.

MODERN WOMAN: I’ll try. God is dead.

OLDTEASER: And the rest of it.

MODERN WOMAN: Gott . . . ist . . . tot. Okay?

OLDTEASER: Okay. Now that you have denied God utterly, you can move directly to the wholly opposite. You can affirm him.

MODERN WOMAN: How?

OLDTEASER: Well, actually, just saying "God is dead (Gott ist tot)" is so radical, that it is the very same as saying he is wholly alive, even if we are in deeply modern times. That’s dialectic. Negation is affirmation. Coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). Isn’t it exciting?

MODERN WOMAN :I suppose so.

OLDTEASER: Of course it is. And you have made the right beginning in negation. You start with the radical denial, negate that, and that negation of course posits the negation of the negation, which is the radical affirmation. Or did I put in too many negations? Never mind. The point is that you, Miss Awdy, are on the tao (way) to wisdom. Notice how I pronounce that "t" as if it were a "d" -- that’s because it’s Chinese, you know. The Chinese don’t spell like we do, because they’re so archaic.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh. Do you mean that I’m going to like saying God is dead because I’ll still be thinking he isn’t?

OLDTEASER: Oh, yes. That’s wisdom. Saying the opposite of what you think. You see, when you take this college course it is not so that you can be instructed about the mere content of the Bible. That would only be knowledge. The goal of our quest in Bible 101 is wisdom. You can’t get there with mere knowledge, which is radically profane, and deeply modern. It’s what the sciences have. The humanities are supposed to teach you to think.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, is that what they’re for? I have often wondered. They’re so boring.

OLDTEASER: That is because the people who teach most of them only know how to think profanely, and are so utterly irrelevant.

MODERN WOMAN: Right. And some of them are crude.

OLDTEASER: My courses are designed to make you think deeply and profoundly. That is to say, of course, I teach you to think dialectically.

MODERN WOMAN: Doing something to opposites, you mean.

OLDTEASER: You’ve got the crucial notion.

MODERN WOMAN: To make them stop being opposite?

OLDTEASER: Something like that.

MODERN WOMAN: Could I use it in my other courses?

OLDTEASER: Of course. Everybody should use it. I wish I could get our so-called political scientists to teach statesmen how to think dialectically.

MODERN WOMAN: Why?

OLDTEASER: Because then they could solve the world’s problems. For instance, American statesmen should make everybody else in the world mad at the United States. They should simply utterly alienate all the other countries in the world. Alienate them radically and completely and wholly. Then we would stand radically opposite to them in perfect enmity. And of course the moment the absolute extreme was reached it would immediately become transformed into its dialectical opposite -- friendship. Everybody in the world would love us, and there would be perfect peace.

MODERN WOMAN: That would be nice.

OLDTEASER: But of course, as Nietzsche, the greatest prophet of the modern world, has taught us, profound chaos is our destiny in the world. So it doesn’t actually matter what statesmen do.

MODERN WOMAN: Yes, it’s chaos that I’ve been feeling.

OLDTEASER: That’s because you’re so wholly contemporary, Miss Awdy. That’s the best way to be, because it keeps you relevant. But you need help.

MODERN WOMAN: I certainly do.

OLDTEASER: Well, now you have taken a number of courses at Arena University, and all have given you knowledge.

MODERN WOMAN: Well . . .

OLDTEASER: Of course they have. But now is precisely the time to start using dialectic. Negate your knowledge. The result obviously will be wisdom, because wisdom is of course the radical opposite of knowledge. You see?

MODERN WOMAN: No.

OLDTEASER: Well, that is to say, it is time for you to wholly obliterate from your mind all the knowledge you have put in it. That will be your negation. Rebel! Rebel against knowledge, Miss Awdy! Rebel against Arena University!

MODERN WOMAN: I’d like to do that. I really would. But I don’t think I can do anything radical just now. Because, like I told you, I think I’m losing my mind.

OLDTEASER: Oh, yes. I remember. Good! Good! Deeply exciting. Could you describe in a little more detail these feelings of unreality you’ve been having?

MODERN WOMAN: Well, just this morning I was sitting down, just sitting down, and all of a sudden it happened.

OLDTEASER: What happened?

MODERN WOMAN: Just the minute I sat down, at the second that I touched . . .

OLDTEASER: Touched what?

MODERN WOMAN: When I touched . . . well, bottom . . . I had a vivid impression of having touched bottom just like that before.

OLDTEASER: Oh, of course. Modern Man -- or Woman -- is often thinking of the past. It’s a sign of the end of our Civilization. Just like the man who reviews his life between the time he’s jumped off the top of a building and before he’s reached the ground. Thinking historically is the greatest fault of contemporary sensibility. The terror of history.

MODERN WOMAN: It was terrible, all right. It was like I was touching bottom at this moment and touching bottom in the past moment, both at the same time. I felt like I was back there. And here, at the same time. Oh dear, I’m not explaining it very well.

OLDTEASER: [Profound pause] Miss Awdy, you don’t have to explain it. I understand perfectly. You have had a Proustian experience. I am amazed! [Pause] Did you like it?

MODERN WOMAN: I don’t know.

OLDTEASER: Of course you did. Your joy and ecstasy confirm existentially that it was nothing other than a Proustian experience.

MODERN WOMAN: Pardon me, Dr. Oldteaser. What is a Proustian experience?

OLDTEASER: You don’t know what a Proustian experience is? I am deeply shocked, Miss Awdy. You haven’t read Proust?

MODERN WOMAN: I don’t think so.

OLDTEASER: Everybody has read Proust. He was the last flower of the Ironic Age, but wholly contemporary. And utterly profane. He wrote the most immoral novel that has ever been written.

MODERN WOMAN: Really? I would like to read that.

OLDTEASER : Well you can’t read it. You have to live it. You will live through the passing away of absolutely everything and be pervaded by sorrow. Doesn’t that sound exciting?

MODERN WOMAN: I’m not sure.

OLDTEASER: Well you can listen to it then. Because it is a wholly contemporary vision of the Western Self, fully orchestrated by a Buddhist.

MODERN WOMAN: I can’t think how a novel would sound in an orchestra. I can’t think how a vision of a self would sound either.

OLDTEASER: Don’t try. You can just read it after all. And in it you will find Proustian experiences which exactly parallel what you have described in your own experience this morning.

MODERN WOMAN: I will?

OLDTEASER: Yes, it was essentially a vision, a vision of the Eternal in Time. It was a Moment with a capital letter. An illumination (illumination). Or -- and here is one of the seventeen greatest words in the language of dialectical theology: an epiphany.

MODERN WOMAN: A what?

OLDTEASER: Epiphany. Or hierophany. They are different, of course, but exactly parallel. I usually say "epiphany." That’s because Modern Man has found so many epiphanies in Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Joyce, and all those other last flowers of the Ironic Age. And there are even more in the genuinely contemporary writers, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Blake, Nietzsche, and all the artists of the Modern Age. E . . . Pi . . . Funny. Can you remember it?

MODERN WOMAN :I think so. Epiphany.

OLDTEASER: That’s precisely right. Now Proust’s novel, since it is radically profane, is . . . wholly sacred! He embraces time with those Proustian experiences. Stubbing his toe on stones, breaking plates with his spoon, drooling into his napkin, and choking on all those nasty little cakes. He embraces time radically by embracing these times so utterly and by making other mimes manifest inside them! So he dialectically reveals the Eternal as incarnate in fragments of time, and . . .

MODERN WOMAN: What did you say the name of it was?

OLDTEASER: I was careful not to say. In English it is called The Remembrance of Things Past, which is wholly misleading, because it completely fails to suggest the quest Proust made. That is, his quest for the mystic ecstasy of his little accidental moments of Proustian experience. The true name is in the French. It is called A la recherche du temps perdu (research for lost time). You must remember that when you’re reading or living it. Remember it’s really scientific research, and you won’t forget how contemporary it is, and profane.

MODERN WOMAN: But I can’t read anything now. [Starts to sob again]I’m losing my mind.

OLDTEASER: Now, Miss Awdy, stop crying. It’s so bourgeois. You must learn to think dialectically, so you won’t feel anything. Of course you’re losing your mind. That’s because you’re so contemporary. But it is precisely at this point that you must negate. Negate madness. Annihilate it. And what then stands forth? What could it be other than that you are gaining your mind? Your funny experience of unreality was a Proustian epiphany, remember? And there is nothing more real than that.

MODERN WOMAN: I suppose the reason it seems so unreal is that it wasn’t just that one moment before -- of touching bottom -- that I seemed to return to this morning. It was more bottom-touchings. It was like all the bottom-touchings I’d ever felt and every bottom-touching anyone else had ever felt. Since the beginning of the world.

OLDTEASER: Since the beginning of the world? That sounds like the exact parallel of the experience of archaic man, as revealed by Eliade. I am amazed, Miss Awdy! You experienced the Eternal Return in bottom-touchings! The archaic experience is to go back to the Primal Bottom-Touching. Out of time. It is utterly sacred, And you’ve had it! You know Eliade of course,

MODERN WOMAN: I forget.

OLDTEASER: I deeply hope you do. He is the greatest living contemporary interpreter of the whole world of primitive and archaic religion. Also of alchemy in both East and West, as well as in the North and South. And of all the various forms of Yoga, and all fifty-two positions. He is the exact parallel of Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon profanely took all knowledge for his province. Eliade takes all wisdom for his.

MODERN WOMAN: [In tears again] But what does he have to do with touching my bottom?

OLDTEASER: Since he is a true historian of religions, he is able to write with authority and understanding and relevance about the whole vast realm of the sacred. So he can help us to recognize the archaic experience of the sacred, no matter what arena it is manifested in. And I think that it manifested itself in your arena this morning, Miss Awdy. Yes, you have indubitably been opened to the archaic sacred.

MODERN WOMAN: Which shows that I am losing my mind?

OLDTEASER: Not at all. It reveals your utter sanity. I thought you had experienced nothing but the profanity of the Proustian experience. But now I see that you were engaged in a deep dialectic. Your experience was also a genuine coincidence of the opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). It was merely profane in bringing together your contemporary bottom-touching with a past bottom-touching. You were still bound to history, with all its terror. But with your sensation of the repetition (anamnesis) of all bottom-touchings, you have manifested a Cosmogonic Act. That is a Return to the Eternal. You have abolished and shattered history, Miss Awdy! Isn’t that wonderful?

MODERN WOMAN: I should say so. Only I wish I’d done it sooner. Before I took History 101 and 102. Still it will help some of my friends. How did I finally get rid of it?

OLDTEASER: Like this: During your epiphany you simply were not living in time at all, because you were far too archaic. You were living in Eternity, which is to say, in illo tempore (in those (lays). And I can tell you, Miss Awdy, Eternity is the only time worth living in. Especially now, in deeply modern times, when history is such a terror. It’s just been asking to be abolished and shattered. And the best way to do that is to become radically archaic with Eliade. Rebel, Miss Awdy! Be a primitive man. Or Woman. Negate!

MODERN WOMAN: I quite often am, quite primitive. And utterly archaic. Especially on dates.

OLDTEASER: Please do not tell me about your personal life, Miss Awdy.

MODERN WOMAN: But, Dr. Oldteaser, I want to tell you all about myself. That’s what I came to your office for. You help me so much. To think, and all. It’s so exciting to negate and rebel. I want to know you. Please, Dr. Oldteaser . . . Tim? . . . Call me Elly.

OLDTEASER: No, Miss Awdy. I can’t do that. You may be a shaman, but you are still a student in Bible 101.

MODERN WOMAN: [Sighs] I see.

OLDTEASER: But you are the first shaman I’ve had in Bible 101. It is exciting. By making contact with the profane like Proust, and with the sacred at the same time, like Eliade. you are existentially immersed in the most profound dialectical relationship to yourself. Having become radically archaic you have of course inevitably manifested yourself as radically modern. That’s dialectic.

MODERN WOMAN: I see. All my friends are very modern. But I don’t think any of them are as archaic as I am on dates.

OLDTEASER: But Miss Awdy, impressive as your revelation of the sacred is, and profane as your bottom-teaching is, and as deeply dialectical as you are, I am afraid you have not gone far enough.

MODERN WOMAN: I haven’t? My friends think I’ve gone much too far.

OLDTEASER: No. Your creation of the profane bottom-touching is radical and your creation of the sacred bottom-touching is radical, but they’re just not radical enough. Radical, yes, but not truly radical.

MODERN WOMAN: I’m sorry. What can I do?

OLDTEASER: I don’t know. I’m afraid we have reached the limits of your sensibility. Unless . . .

MODERN WOMAN: Unless what?

OLDTEASER: Unless you could remember something especially concrete and thus utterly profane, grounded in your modern consciousness this morning. It would have to be at the Moment of bottom-touching. As you were sitting down, did you think of any particular concrete, historical, and thus more radically profane thing that your bottom had touched?

MODERN WOMAN: Well, now that you mention it, I do believe I did think of something. I thought of sitting down on . . .

OLDTEASER: On what, Miss Awdy?

MODERN WOMAN: On my father’s knee.

OLDTEASER: [Profound pause] Really? That is profane. Your father’s knee! Your father. I’m having an insight! I’ve got it! Do you know what this sitting on your father’s knee means?

MODERN WOMAN: What does it mean, Dr. Oldteaser?

OLDTEASER: It means that your vision was not only Proustian and Eliadian, it was Freudian. And that is more radically profane.

MODERN WOMAN: I know it’s not a very nice word.

OLDTEASER: Of course it’s nice. Because it’s so profane. All profanity is sacred. Remember that.

MODERN WOMAN : I’ll try.

OLDTEASER: You have revealed your deep Oedipus Complex this morning.

MODERN WOMAN: [Bursts into tears again] I knew it. I was crazy. I’ve lost my mind.

OLDTEASER: Shut up, Miss Awdy. You have not lost your mind. You are simply on the tao (way) to wisdom. By a dialectical route. Everybody has an Oedipus Complex.

MODERN WOMAN: They do?

OLDTEASER: Of course. Haven’t you read Freud?

MODERN WOMAN:I don’t think so.

OLDTEASER: You haven’t read Freud? I’m deeply shocked, Miss Awdy. Everybody’s read Freud. And the good news is that everything he wrote is indubitably true and real. Insofar as it has met with such a profound response from the contemporary sensibility. Can’t you see that your sensibility has responded profoundly to him? He is even more deeply profane than Proust.

MODERN WOMAN: Did he write immoral novels too?

OLDTEASER: Unfortunately, no. He was much too busy with his hysterical patients and with his Analysis. You know what that is, don’t you?

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, yes. It’s very expensive. Some of my friends . . .

OLDTEASER: Well, it didn’t cost him anything. Because he was able to do it to himself. Which exactly parallels the polyeroticism of his greatest interpreter, Norman Brown. It was the first analysis. The Primal Analysis.

MODERN WOMAN: How nice.

OLDTEASER: And while engaged in the quest, he discovered that Oedipus, a Greek king (rex), lay right in the center of his vision. That was the discovery of the Oedipus Complex.

MODERN WOMAN: How lucky. Did he patent it?

OLDTEASER: No. He couldn’t genuinely do that, because he was so unoriginal. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Freud was only the authentic descendant of Nietzsche, the greatest prophet of the modern world. He prophesied the whole modern world, including Freud.

MODERN WOMAN: That’s Too bad.

OLDTEASER: No. It’s really good. Good for Nietzsche’s reputation, which needs a boost. Freud never read Nietzsche, of course. Nietzsche was so rich that Freud could make no more sense of him than anybody else and gave it up completely. That’s why we say he was an authentic descendant. We’re speaking dialectically of course. It’s because Freud got none of his ideas from Nietzsche.

MODERN WOMAN: I’m not sure I understand that.

OLDTEASER: You will when you’re older and more contemporary. What excites me now is that in your very vision of the profane and sacred bottom-touching, in your epiphany of the Eternal in a fragment of time this morning, you touched bottom to your father’s knee and felt wholly other all over.

MODERN WOMAN: That’s right.

OLDTEASER: [Pause] Now think carefully, Miss Awdy. I want you to think very carefully.

MODERN WOMAN: Not dialectically then?

OLDTEASER: No. Just try to remember. [Pause, deepens voice] Are you sure it was your father’s knee you sat down on this morning?

MODERN WOMAN: This morning?

OLDTEASER: Yes, this morning. And in Eternity (in illo tempore) too, of course. Don’t evade the crucial issue, Miss Awdy. Was it your father’s knee?

MODERN WOMAN: [In a low voice] No.

OLDTEASER: What was it then?

MODERN WOMAN: [Almost inaudibly] You know.

OLDTEASER: Of course I do. And that is profane. What could be more radically and genuinely profane than that? Though not particularly contemporary.

MODERN WOMAN: Nothing, I guess.

OLDTEASER: [Loudly] What did you say?

MODERN WOMAN: [Raises her voice] I said, "Nothing."

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! Miss Awdy, that is the profoundest statement you have made in our times. Nothingness is precisely what is more profane than the mere object of your Oedipus Complex.

MODERN WOMAN: I would have thought it was better than nothing.

OLDTEASER: No, Nothing is better than it. You have of course read La nausée, the first and most important novel of Jean-Paul Sartre?

MODERN WOMAN: I don’t think so.

OLDTEASER: You haven’t read La nausée (Nausea)? Then surely you have read L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness)?

MODERN WOMAN:I don’t think so.

OLDTEASER: You haven’t read Being and Nothingness? But it is Sartre’s magnum opus (big work). It reveals to Modern Man -- or Woman -- that Nothing is the key to Sartre’s system. It is the "hole of being," right in the middle of everything in his book. Have you ever thought of that?

MODERN WOMAN: Well, now that you mention it, this morning, while I was sitting and feeling wholly other all over, I did begin to imagine that a big hole gaped below me.

OLDTEASER: Are you sure?

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, yes. The biggest hole you ever saw. It made me sort of dizzy.

OLDTEASER: Of course. Nausea at the sheer isness of the world. In that hole. Because the world, properly negated, is nothing other than a hole -- absolute Nothingness. You were really negating more radically than I realized, to see that, Miss Awdy. To see the world as a hole. But what was happening to your father at this Moment? What was happening to his knee and all?

MODERN WOMAN: I was sort of pushing him out. Into the hole.

OLDTEASER: Good! You were annihilating him, profane as he is. And making him into Nothing, which is even more deeply profane.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh. he’s not so bad.

OLDTEASER: I am speaking theologically. Don’t bring in any moral judgments.

MODERN WOMAN: All right. Well, anyway. I was pushing him out, and while I was doing it, my mind was going completely blank, just as empty as that hole. But just as it went blank my father somehow rose up, somehow changed -- changed so that he wasn’t just a man anymore, but a woman too. He was both at the same time, floating up from under me to fill the whole world around. Oh! [ bursts into tears] That’s worse than an Oedipus Complex. I must have been completely insane by that time.

OLDTEASER: Not at all, Miss Awdy. You weren’t even in time, remember? You had destroyed history. You had manifested the Eternal in your bottom-touching Moment. All that radical sacred. And you had in those days (in illo tempore) also embraced your radically profane father. Still more radically profane, you could push him out of your . . . uh . . . vision and embrace a hole, a hole full of Nothing. And you did it with joyful nausea. I congratulate you on your profanity.

MODERN WOMAN: Thank you.

OLDTEASER: But now you have revealed that you were also witness, in the midst of doing all these other exciting things, to a big Archetype. The Male-Female Archetype. That’s what came floating up from under you. Do you know what it means?

MODERN WOMAN: What?

OLDTEASER: The big Archetype.

MODERN WOMAN: What does it mean?

OLDTEASER: Well, Miss Awdy, when the Male and Female are wholly interpenetrated and androgynous (male and female) [male et femelle], they are manifesting a cosmological principle. And cosmological principles are Archetypes. Can you see that?

MODERN WOMAN: I’m not sure I can.

OLDTEASER: Well, I hope you aren’t thinking of a Jungian archetype.

MODERN WOMAN:I don’t think I am.

OLDTEASER: Good. Jung, I’m sorry to say, has next to no claim to contemporaneity, though he lived a very long time. He just gradually became increasingly irrelevant with age. Every step he took after he left Freud took him farther and farther away from the world of Modern Man -- and Woman. Ultimately, myth prevailed in his system, and his thought lost all semblance of rational meaning. Isn’t that too bad?

MODERN WOMAN: I suppose so.

OLDTEASER: Your Archetype is Eliadian. And he says that the interpenetrated Male and Female are nothing other than the primary symbol of the primordial Totality. That is to say, they are Everything. Totality. See what your Nothingness has turned out to be?

MODERN WOMAN: What?

OLDTEASER: Everything. Because right in the center of Nothing, in that hole, you manifested precisely the right Archetype. I again congratulate you on your morning’s work, Miss Awdy. How did you do it?

MODERN WOMAN: I don’t know. When I think back on the way it happened, it seems to me I just pushed and pushed and out went my father’s . . . uh . . . knee and all. Out went my father. In came the Archetype -- or whatever you call it -- and then out again. In and out, until even the hole was gone. Nothing below me and nothing above. In fact, my mind was a complete blank.

OLDTEASER: Good! Good! A complete blank. That is truly a radical vision of the sacred and Eternal, by far the best way you have described your morning’s Moment. And you just pushed?

MODERN WOMAN: Yes. I couldn’t help it. I had to. I suppose it was mad. But I just pushed them out and my mind went utterly blank while I did it.

OLDTEASER: "Pushed them out"! What are you saying, Miss Awdy? [ pause] Listen carefully to me, Miss Awdy. Open yourself to me wholly. I have just had a profound insight into your Vision. Where were you this morning when you had it?

MODERN WOMAN:I never said,

OLDTEASER: I know. Now I want you to.

MODERN WOMAN: Do I have to?

OLDTEASER: Indubitably. I must know. I must know because it is of the greatest importance that you embrace still more radically the historical moment in which the epiphany was manifested. Let’s do that now.

MODERN WOMAN: Why?

OLDTEASER: Do I have to explain to you again the principles of Dialectic? You have now revealed to me that in your Moment you reached the goal of the most radical, radical sacred. Your mind was completely blank.

MODERN WOMAN: That’s right. It did.

OLOTEAsER: Now to reach the higher goal of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) you must have let stand forth the most radical, radical profane. Tell me now, where was your epiphany manifested? In what room?

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, Dr. Oldteaser, do I have to say?

OLDTEASER: Yes, you do.

MODERN WOMAN: In the bathroom.

OLDTEASER: I knew it. This is deeply exciting. And you were sitting down?

MODERN WOMAN: [Whispers] Yes.

OLDTEASER: And you touched bottom.

MODERN WOMAN: Yes.

OLDTEASER: You actually touched bottom to the toilet seat, didn’t you, Miss Awdy? You just thought of touching your father’s knee and all.

MODERN WOMAN: [Sobs] Yes, I did. I didn’t want to tell you that part of it. What my bottom touched.

OLDTEASER: Well, I’m glad I found it out. Don’t be embarrassed. Genuinely modern people are frank, you know. We embrace the profane. And I think you did that too, this morning.

MODERN WOMAN: I suppose so.

OLDTEASER: Good. So now listen carefully to me again. This is of the greatest importance. It is precisely at this point that I must ask you, precisely what action were you engaged in -- existentially -- while you sat there, having your epiphany?

MODERN WOMAN: What do you mean?

OLDTEASER: I mean what were you pushing out -- existentially -- Into the hole beneath you? Tell me.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh dear, Professor Oldteaser; I can’t say it.

OLOTEASER: Come on now. Don’t be bourgeois. Rebel. Say it.

MODERN WOMAN: Well. [Whispers] Faeces.

OLOTEASER: Oh, my God. Nobody says faeces anymore except psychoanalysts. Don’t you know that the grossness and absurdity of psychoanalytic language is beyond satire? The language of dialectical theology, I’m proud to say, is not. Say "shit."

MODERN WOMAN: Shit.

OLDTEASER: Good! Now that we have settled that, this is precisely the point at which I must tell you that your epiphany, at such a moment, is of the profoundest significance. Your mind was completely blank, so you were in direct contact with the radical, radical sacred. At the same moment you were engaged in pushing out shit, which is the profanest thing you could have been doing. The radical, radical sacred and the radical, radical profane, Miss Awdy. They coincided in you this morning! The coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), you see. That is precisely the goal of the dialectical movement. Aren’t you pleased?

MODERN WOMAN:I guess so.

OLDTEASER: And am the same mime, you have been witness to the deeply anal character of Western Man -- or Woman -- as in Brown. Norman Brown, who will someday stand forth and be manifested as Freud’s greatest interpreter. He has penetrated into the anal character of Western Man in the most exciting part of his book, Life Against Death.

MODERN WOMAN : Life against what?

OLDTEASER: Life against death. He has his dialectic too, like all truly contemporary artists. Instead of the sacred and the profane, he has life and death. You could probably make them coincide, too, now that you have learned how.

MODERN WOMAN: But not now please. Actually I don’t think I’m through with the sacred and the profane. There was a little more, one thing more, in my Moment this morning. Do you want me to tell you?

OLDTEASER: Yes, very much. Please do.

MODERN WOMAN: Well, while I was having my epiphany and all, sitting there . . on the toilet . . . pushing out . . . shit, and my mind a total blank, a funny little phrase suddenly came into my vision, and I don’t know what it means. I’m afraid it is quite mad.

OLDTEASER: What was it?

MODERN WOMAN: It may sound funny. I don’t know what it means. It was this: "The just lives by faith."

OLDTEASER: What? Miss Awdy, are you serious?

MODERN WOMAN: I think so.

OLDTEA5ER: Are you sure? Is that indubitably the phrase you heard?

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, yes. I’m sure. It was plain, running through in a tinkly little voice, like water on tin.

OLDTEASER: Miss Awdy, I am amazed! Your epiphany, then, is an exact parallel to that of Martin Luther. Those were precisely the words he was meditating on when be had his experience in the tower.

MODERN WOMAN: What was that?

OLDTEASER: He had a message from the Holy Spirit while he was on the privy in the tower of a monastery in Wittenberg in the sixteenth century. And that was the beginning of the Reformation. The anal character was particularly deep in Luther and all the Protestants who came after him. He was doing precisely what you were doing when he had his experience in the tower. And the same phrase came to you as had come to him in the midst of a profound epiphany! What a Moment!

MODERN WOMAN: Mine or his?

OLDTEASER: Both. But especially yours. How did you feel about it at the time this morning?

MODERN WOMAN: Of course my mind was a complete blank, except for the little phrase. It was sort of nice to have the little phrase there while I was feeling so wholly other all over, and . . . oh . . . doing what I was doing. I felt strongly that I would like to have it keep happening. I would like it to keep happening over and over, for ever.

OLDTEASER: You felt that, Miss Awdy? That’s wonderful! You willed that Moment to come back to you eternally. What could that be other than Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, his greatest doctrine? I often put it in capital letters. That’s when I’m thinking of it joyfully, and metaphysically. When it seems to me as if the future would be awfully tiresome with all these moments coming back again and again, then I put it in small letters, and think of it existentially, to show my anguish (Angst). Or is it the other way -- capitals for existential thinking, and . . . -- anyhow the distinction is crucial.

MODERN WOMAN: I’ll bet it is.

OLDTEASER: You’d win. Of course Nietzsche said I should be horrified at the thought of eternal recurrence. He thought of it while he was swallowing a snake, and he was utterly horrified, thinking of coming back to Germany again and again and again, having to write over and over all those books that have to be in archaic English, even though he was not archaic himself, since he was so contemporary and wholly relevant. And then think of having all those rumors about his sister repeated eternally, when there has been such an effort to quash them. But now you, Miss Awdy. You are going to have this morning forever. You have willed it, joyfully. Isn’t that a nightmare? It takes the deepest courage to embrace it, but I believe that you, Miss Awdy, are open to it. Have you ever swallowed a snake?

MODERN WOMAN:I don’t think so.

OLDTEASER: I’m sure you can do it.

MODERN WOMAN: I’m glad you believe in me.

OLDTEASER: I do, more and more. You have come so far in the quest, the quest for wisdom. You were engaged from the first in trying to return to illo tempore (those days), in your archaic experience of eternal bottom-touching. But in that effort you are actually trying to go backward, to primitive nontime. That was only an Eternal Return, which was created by Eliade, I put that in capital letters. I forget what it means when I put it in small letters, so I guess the distinction is not crucial.

MODERN WOMAN: Apparently not. But what is the distinction between Eliade’s doctrine and Nietzsche’s?

OLDTEASER: They are an exact dialectical parallel. Nietzsche’s doctrine is Eternal Recurrence, instead of Return. He wills the eternal repetition of the profane moment in time, and so looks forward to the future, instead of the past. It is his triumphant hymn of joy in praise of a vast and meaningless cosmos.

MODERN WOMAN: Meaningless?

OLDTEASER: Of course. In the stance you took this morning, you yourself are witness to the truth of the vision of the world as shit.

MODERN WOMAN: Oh, Dr. Oldteaser.

OLOTEASER: You are. And it is the profoundest truth you have ever manifested. But you have embraced wholly that truth. For you have willed the eternal Recurrence of shit. You needed to do that, or you would have been left only with the Eternal Return of the sacred bottom-touching. Now you have embraced them both: the most radical, radical profane -- shit -- and the most radical, radical sacred -- the utter blank of your mind when your bottom is touched. All together, immersed and dissolved in your morning’s Moment! But what a Moment!

MODERN WOMAN: Yes. I am beginning to see that it was something. At first I just thought that I was losing my mind. And I’m not sure, quite, that I haven’t lost in. Though you do help me so much. I think I see that you mean that I finally got in my Moment to the coincidence of opposites you talk about in Latin so much, or whatever language it is. So they ought to stop being opposite now. Does that mean I’m through with my dialectic?

OLDTEASER: No, Miss Awdy. The end is of course precisely the beginning. There is one thing about your Moment you have forgotten.

MODERN WOMAN: What is that?

OLDTEASER: That it is a Lutherian Moment. As well as Prousmian, Eliadian, Freudian, Sartrian, and Brown.

MODERN WOMAN: So?

OLDTEASER: So you have willed the Eternal Recurrence of the Reformation!

MODERN WOMAN: The Reformation? What’s that?

OLDTEASER: That’s what Martin Luther started in the privy. And so all the real Christians left Rome. I’ve often feared I might have to go back, but I won’t worry any more, since we are to have the Reformation again in our time. This is precisely what is the dearest hope of Eliade: the rebirth of a new Man -- or Woman. I have been so busy with the employment of this or that modern artist as a route to a new form of theology, that I just haven’t had time to make any contacts like yours. Now we can work together. You make the contacts, when you have time, and I’ll open myself to the truly paradoxical language that the new theology will need to employ in the contemporary Christian dialectic. It never occurred to me that the new contemporary and radical theology would be precisely the Recurrence of the Reformation, until you revealed it to me, Miss Awdy. Now we must get busy. Let’s see now. Luther spread the glad tidings of the advent of the new man and new theology, by nailing 95 theses to the church door. Or was it 94? That is precisely what we will do. Now, where’s some paper? Here. We need a long one. That legal pad. Now. 95 theses. Maybe only 94. Here we go: Number one. All traditional theological thinking has become wholly meaningless, now that civilization has ended in our deep and modern times." I wonder if that is strong enough. "Number two. The first requirement of a contemporary theological method is a full understanding of the death of God. Gott ist tot. Of course everybody knows that by now. "Number three. Modern Man-or Woman (that is a reference to you, Miss Awdy) -- is engaged in the quest of a Christian dialectic between the sacred and the profane in the context of our present situation." I will use you, Miss Awdy, to show them how profane our present situation is. Though of course some people are more profane than others. And some are more contemporary, too. I do feel sorry for those who aren’t sufficiently contemporary and modern and radical, Miss Awdy. They must feel utterly sad, in their antiquity pockets, being so irrelevant. Now you and I, Miss Awdy . . .

[PROFESSOR OLDTEASER pauses and looks up. MODERN WOMAN has risen from her chair, walked into the exact center of the room, hoisted her skirts, and manifested herself right into the most characteristically modern of genuinely contemporary dance positions -- the defecating. Her eyes stare, and her expression seems a perfect blank. She is concentrating on a single point. She shudders slightly. PROFESSOR OLDTEASER jumps to his feet and cries out]:

Wait! No! Not here, Miss Awdy. Don’t have an epiphany here. Not in my office! Not on my floor! Stop!

[MODERN WOMAN does not move]

Listen to me, Miss Awdy. I think this sort of thing is not an epiphany after all. You are not having visions. You are losing your mind. You really are. I know I said it was not madness, but a vision, and I was negating. Well, now I negate the negation. You are losing your mind. Miss Awdy, listen to me. You are as mad as a hatter. Get out! Va-t’en! Schnell! Get out of my office!

[MODERN WOMAN is still motionless. She is grounded in dead center, and looks neither forward nor backward. The stage slowly dims until it is wholly black, as black as the terrible night created by the death of God, At once, inevitably, as in a coincidentia oppositorum. there is a blinding flash. Light appears in precisely those corners which are most filled with darkness. It gradually focuses down upon the exact center of the stage, where MODERN WOMAN is still manifest, skirts around her waist, and there is revealed to us in these our modern times nothing but

The Profoundest,

Deepest,

And Most Radical

End.]

Chapter 14: Notes for a Dialogue by Mircea Eliade

Note: Mircea Eliade is Professor of the History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Illinois.

Some months ago I gladly accepted the invitation to discuss Thomas Altizer’s book, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred.1 Unfortunately, I did not have the time to write the "critical dialogue" that I originally had in mind. But while rereading Professor Altizer’s book, I made a series of rather loosely Connected critical notes and comments. These are certainly inadequate, and I had hoped to develop and articulate them more fully.

I am happy to be included in a volume devoted to Professor Altizer’s works, if only to express publicly my friendship for the man and my admiration for the author. The issue of agreeing or disagreeing with his theological innovations is, at least in my case, irrelevant. I am interested in Altizer’s writings for their own sake; I consider them original and important spiritual adventures.

My notes are largely confined to certain of Altizer’s interpretations with which I find points of disagreement and misunderstanding. I did not feel it necessary to be concerned with what I may call the positive aspects of his analysis.

1. A preliminary remark is that the book is personally important for Altizer, because it uncovers the direction of his own thinking. This does not imply that it is not a "serious" or "scholarly" work; it is, but, as happens with so many other scholarly products, it is also a deeply personal undertaking. Altizer does much more than present, discuss, and criticize my contribution to the understanding of homo religiosus. He writes original and always stimulating chapters on Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Proust, Freud, and Teilhard de Chardin. His comments on Nietzsche, especially, are of great consequence, for they reveal Altizer’s deepest level of preoccupation and commitment. Indeed, a few years after the publication of this book, he became the most popular champion of the "death of God" theology.

2. I have the impression that the reader must finish the volume feeling rather disappointed with Altizer’s declaration that my work utilizes the dialectic of the sacred in a "revolutionary" way. This is not surprising; for after Nietzsche’s splendid proclamation of "in jedem Nu beginnt das Sein," Proust’s discovery that "the only paradise is always the paradise we have lost," or Freud’s heroic transformation of metaphysics into metapsychology, how can one be attracted to the ideas of an author whose books bear such titles as Shamanism, Yoga, or The Forge and the Crucible? Or, to put it even more bluntly: how can the works of a historian and phenomenologist of religion display problems, discoveries, and splendors comparable with those found in The Idiot, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Interpretation of Dreams, or The Phenomenon of Man?

3. Of course, one recognizes Altizer’s design: convinced that my interpretation of the dialectic of the sacred is timely for Christian theology, he wanted to show that other thinkers and artists have anticipated this type of dialectic or have proposed similar paradoxical recoveries of the sacred. I can only be thankful that he chose to discuss my work in the context of so many giants. But all of them are creative authors, and Altizer, who relied exclusively on my "scholarly" studies published in English and French, has ignored the complementary part of my oeuvre written in Romanian (eight novels, two volumes of short stories, five volumes of philosophical essays and literary criticism). Of course, these works are not yet available in English and only a few are translated into French and German; but I do not understand why Altizer did not consult Forêt interdite (a rather large novel of almost seven hundred pages), which could have helped him grasp more acutely my personal ideas on time, history, destiny, etc.

The fact is that "situations" and "messages" comparable, for example, with those deciphered in Kierkegaard, Camus, or Sartre, could be found in my literary and philosophical writings rather than in, say, Shamanism, Yoga, or even in The Sacred and the Profane. Thus, when Altizer states that "Dostoevsky’s novels demonstrate that a Christian sensibility can be open to the profane -- indeed, can be immersed in the profane -- while yet remaining indubitably Christian" (p. 113), he describes what I have tried to show in most of my fiction. Likewise, he could not have written that I "remain closed to the religious power of the profane" (p. 196), if he had read Sarpele (Bucharest: Editura Ciorne, 1937; in German translation published as Andronic und die Schlange, Munich: Nymphenbürger Verlag, 1939) or other of my novellas and short stories.

4. Altizer could reply that I did not manifest the same "openness to the profane" in my historical and hermeneutical works. Here, it seems to me, is a rather serious misunderstanding. In all my "scholarly" studies I attempted to illustrate a rigorous and relevant hermeneutics of the sacred. I did not intend to elaborate a personal philosophical anthropology. My principal objective was to forge a hermeneutical method capable of revealing to modern, desacralized man the meaning and spiritual values of archaic, Oriental, and traditional religious creations. I am truly grateful to Altizer for understanding so well, and expressing so sympathetically, my endeavor to disclose the coherence and richness of "primitive" and Asiatic religions. However, one can again detect a certain kind of malentendu. Reading his enthusiastic analysis of Yoga, Shamanism, The Forge and the Crucible, etc., one can receive the impression that these books constitute a cryptic philosophical anthropology. Altizer appears to be convinced that I present the "situation" of the shaman, the yogi, the alchemist, and particularly the "archaic mode of being in the world" as models for modern man. Naturally enough, he opposes this nostalgia as a regression to the archaic. "Like the Oriental mystic," he writes, "Eliade conceives of the way to the ultimate sacred as a return to the ‘nontime’ of the primordial beginning." And after quoting a passage from Patterns in Comparative Religion2 he adds: "As always, Eliade, in such statements, reveals his non-Christian ground; he is unable to say Yes to the future, to envision a truly New Creation, to look forward to the Kingdom of God" (p. 195).

Altizer has unraveled intentions in my works of which I am not aware.3 My scholarly enterprise was always more modest and more related to the labor of a religious hermeneut. I was striving simply to disclose the meaning and relevance of non-Western and non-Christian religions. I still think that such a "creative hermeneutics" is an important contribution to contemporary culture. This is not because it proposes "models" for a modern man, Christian or agnostic, for I never suggested that we must go back to the archaic or Oriental modes of existence in order to recapture the sacred.4 The possible relevance of my hermeneutics lies elsewhere -- it contributes toward filling the gap, so to say, between the modern, Western or Westernized, world and the "eccentric," dark, and enigmatic "primitive" and Oriental worlds. To understand the archaic or Asiatic modes of being, that is, to realize the religious foundation of their existence, is for me already a considerable accomplishment, not only because it helps a Westerner to communicate meaningfully with the representatives of Asia and the Third World, but, more so, because through such a hermeneutics Western spiritual creativity can be immensely stimulated.

5. It is true that the effort to understand non-Western and non-Christian values cannot succeed without a certain "sympathy" on the part of the hermeneut. This is the case especially when one tries to elucidate the meaning of archaic, and sometimes rather aberrant, religious creations. But such a "sympathy" does not imply either an adhesion to, or a nostalgia for, archaic creations. I have emphasized "primitive" religions only because I felt that previous exegesis, illustrated by so many famous anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, did not do them full justice.

Altizer repeatedly refers to the "prophetic" quality of my work. Were I tempted to accept such an exalted appraisal, I would specify that it is a "prophetism" directly related to our historical moment, namely, the coming together of previously separated worlds, the "planetization" of culture. Indeed, I am convinced that this is the most recent and the most pertinent discovery of the West: the religious, cultural, and political existence of Oriental and "primitive" worlds. For a theologian, real "modernity" is not only the confrontation with the technological, desacralized societies of the West, but the dialogue with the religions that originated and unfolded outside of the Judeo-Christian traditions.

This is surely not a rejection of history, but an anticipation of the creative acts of the future. It is true that I have used the expression the "terror of history," but I was referring particularly to peoples that did not have the possibility or opportunity to "make" history, and to epochs when history was made exclusively by a handful of masters and terrorists, whatever they chose to call themselves. It is against the different types of postHegelian "historicisms" that I rebelled rather than against history as such.5

6. Altizer’s most serious criticism concerns my understanding of the dialectic of the sacred as a hierophany. He interprets this as meaning that the sacred abolishes the profane object in which it manifests itself. But I have repeatedly pointed out that, for example, a sacred stone does not cease to be a stone; in other words, it preserves its place and function in the cosmic environment. In fact, hierophanies could not abolish the profane world, for it is the very manifestation of the sacred that establishes the world, i.e., transforms a formless, unintelligible, and terrifying chaos into a cosmos.6 To quote what I wrote elsewhere:

It was the experience of the sacred which gave birth to the idea that something really exists, that there are absolute values capable of guiding man and giving a meaning to human existence. It is, then, through the experience of the sacred that the ideas of reality, truth, and significance first dawned, to be later elaborated and systematized by metaphysical speculations. The apodictic value of myth is periodically reconfirmed by rituals. Recollection and reenactment of the primordial event help "primitive" men to distinguish and hold to the Real. By virtue of the continual repetition of a paradigmatic act, something shows itself to be fixed and enduring in the universal flux.7

In short, the hierophany is an ontophany -- the experience of the sacred gives reality, shape, and meaning to the world.

Altizer seems very impressed by the archaic and Oriental obsession with the "beginnings." In the nostalgia for a mythical illud tempus, he sees essentially the inability of the "primitive" to affirm the present and the "primitive’s" fear of the future. But this is only partially true, for the models revealed in illo tempore serve to renew the world and to reinforce human life. Although apparently only imitating models supposed to have been revealed in the primordial, mythical time, homo religiosus also conquered the material world. One must always keep this fact in mind when assessing the meaning and function of myth.

Notes:

1. Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (The Westminster Press, 1963). References to pages in this book are included in parentheses in the text rather than in the notes.

2. Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions (Paris: Payot, 1949); Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. by Rosemary Sheed (Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1958), p. 408.

3. Sometimes Altizer misunderstands me, as for instance when he writes that "Eliade has confessed that, in the purer expressions of the sacred, the sacred is both inside and outside of ‘time’; here, the sacred and the profane are no longer in simple opposition" (p. 195). He refers to my Méphistophélès et l’Androgyne (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1962), p. 87; but in that passage I was only analyzing an experience related by Warner Allen in his book, The Time-less Moment; I was not conveying my own understanding of the sacred "inside" or "outside" of time.

4. I do not understand why Altizer considers that a correct exegesis of the yogic types of "knowledge" should imply the allegiance to Oriental modes of cognition and the rejection of Western philosophy also. Thus, after quoting two passages from my Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, tr. by Willard R. Trask (Bollingen Series LVI, Pantheon Books, Inc., 1958), pp. 51 f., he writes: "At this point it will be sufficient to note that Eliade is seeking a form of knowledge in which cognition, as the Western thinker understands it, will have disappeared. Rebelling against the ‘secular’ thought which has now overwhelmed the West, he seeks an authentic mode of understanding the sacred that will allow the sacred to be itself" (pp. 33-34). As a matter of fact, in my book on yoga I tried to elucidate only a specific, and extremely suggestive, Indian mode of thinking. I did not put forward my own philosophical presuppositions.

5. Altizer insists on the ahistorical character of my works. However, in Yoga, in my Birth and Rebirth (tr. by Willard R. Trask [Harper & Brothers, 1958]), and in other minor monographs I tried to describe the transformation of religious patterns by the very fact of their involvement with historical time. Moreover, the synchronic approach is as valid as the diachronic one. I concentrate primarily on structures because I am convinced that such a method is the most adequate for uncovering the meaning of religious phenomena.

6. Altizer asks himself: "Can Eliade remain content with the idea that the goal of man’s choice of the sacred is simply to arrive at a precosmic state? If so, he will be forced to abandon both his dialectical method and his Christian ground" (p. 104). Here again, I do not recognize my thinking. For the last thirty years, and in hundreds of pages, I have stressed the paradigmatic value of the cosmogonic myth, showing that the cosmogony constitutes the exemplary model for all kinds of "creations." The reintegration of the precosmic state is only a moment in the cosmogonic process, and it is superfluous to indicate the religious function of such ephemeral recoveries of the primordial Chaos. There are, certainly, examples depicting the desire to remain definitely in a precosmic state, but these are exceptions belonging mostly to "sophisticated" stages of some high religions (for example, post-Buddhist India).

7. Mircea Eliade, Preface to Thomas N. Munson, Reflective Theology (Yale University Press, 1968), pp. viii-ix.

Chapter 13: Thomas J.J. Altizer Response

Upon first reading this essay I was simply overwhelmed, for Winston L. King has carried my position to a conclusion that I myself was unable to reach, and he has done so on the basis of an understanding of Buddhism that is fuller and more solid than mine. So far as I am aware, Winston L. King and myself are the only Christian theologians who have entered into a dialogue with Buddhism with the purpose of attempting by this means to enrich and even reconstruct the present shape and Structure of Christianity. Thus it was with both delight and fearful apprehension that I followed the argument of this essay, for it challenges my own theological choice at the deepest level. Nor does it challenge it simply in a negative sense, for it opens horizons that had previously been closed to me and others ideas and images with which to voyage into those horizons.

Before taking up this challenge, however, I wish to object to two of King’s points. Both of these points have to do with what King terms "Dualistic Transcendence"; and, at this point, I wish to state only that I do not regard such transcendence as false in a literal or ordinary sense, nor do I believe that a genuine dualistic transcendence is to be found outside of the Christian tradition. From my point of view, God himself negated and reversed his own transcendence in the Incarnation, and the Christian is called to will the death of God as a way of opening himself to the gift or "Body" of God in Christ. Buddhism has never known any form of a truly transcendent realm or deity, hence I concur with the common judgment that from the Christian point of view Buddhism is atheistic. Moreover, it is precisely its "atheism" that makes possible the richness and power of Buddhism, and most particularly so in its Madhyamika and Zen expressions. But I do not regard Buddhism as being either false or inferior to Christianity. On the contrary, I regard Buddhism as a "true" apprehension of the primordial Totality, and as being religiously superior to Christianity. While I believe that Christianity is called to a negation and reversal of both the way to and all images of a primordial Totality, I nevertheless believe that such negation should be dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and therefore it must ultimately entail an affirmation of the primordial Totality.

If nothing else, King’s Christian apprehension of the dialectical way of Zen offers a demonstration of a form of Buddhist dialectical life and power that is apparently not present in Christianity. And how embarrassing it is when my efforts at dialectical thinking are contrasted with Zen! As King notes, my own thinking appears to be almost totally dualistic in this perspective, and I can only plead that I fear that this is inevitable. Yet Zen’s total transcendence of dualism can point the way to a Christian transcendence of dualism, a transcendence that can lie only in our future, for it does not exist in anything that we can know as our Christian past. I must confess that it had never even occurred to me that Zen could be understood as a way of negating Buddhist transcendentalism so that its negation fully parallels the radical Christian negation of transcendence. Perhaps this is true, although such a momentous point cannot easily be understood or assimilated. Here, I can only take up the question of the relation between Zen and Christian affirmation. King astutely and succinctly captures the quality of Zen affirmation in one sentence: "To negate dualism is to affirm oneness; to negate separation is to affirm unity; to deny the unreal is to affirm reality -- without defining them." The all too significant qualification of this last point itself defines a gulf between Buddhism and Christianity. For despite the profundity and profuseness of the purely theoretical or philosophical expressions of Buddhism, these expressions, at least in their Zen and Madhyamika forms, follow a totally negative way. Thereby they not only refuse all positive statement or definition, but they identify such definition as a turning away from the all-embracing life and truth of "Emptiness." Accordingly, Zen affirmation is not susceptible to what we know as definition, and therefore it can appear to us only as pure negation.

Insofar as we remain bound to the meaning and reality of "history," we will also be closed to the positive ground of Zen affirmation. It is not simply that Buddhism knows nothing of what we have known as history, but also that Buddhism is closed to everything that we have known as world and self-affirmation. King’s portrait of Zen particularity makes manifest how Zen can affirm the immediately real even while dissolving all apprehension or awareness of a differentiated real -- thus the disappearance of the distinctive or differentiated categories of nature, deity, and selfhood goes hand in hand with the appearance of the immediately real. Nothing that we have known as "will" is present in this affirmation, nor can affirmation here be understood as a human, a moral, or a religious act. The Taoist category of wu wei ("doing nothing") illuminates the meaning of Zen affirmation, for it is an affirmation in which nothing is done or said. Or, at least, there is nothing present in Zen affirmation that approximates to a Western or Christian language and action. From our point of view, nothing really happens in Zen. Zen knows nothing of a "Fall," nor does it know anything of what we have known as redemption and salvation. Consequently, Zen is closed both to forward-moving process and to backward-moving regression. Nothing is present here of what we have known as goal or direction, and perhaps only the advent of modern Western nihilism opened the West to the meaning and power of Buddhism.

I was particularly taken with the manner in which King, following Nishitani, related the Buddhist image of the "Great Death" to Zen acceptance and affirmation. Now if it is only by the abandoning of oneself and the throwing away of one’s own life that Zen affirmation is possible, then obviously this parallels the Christian way of finding life through death. But a crucial difference between the two immediately presents itself. Just as the Christian celebrates an ultimate death or Crucifixion that is both actual and historical, so likewise a Christian dying with Christ is a dying to a particular and actual human condition. Not only is the Christian called to die to a fallen form of selfhood, but he is also called to die to that form of selfhood which is most immediately real to him. That is to say, the Christian must die to or in an individual and personal form of selfhood, a form of selfhood that is historically real and that is actually and indubitably real to a fully individual or differentiated mode of consciousness. Not only does Buddhism know little or nothing of such a form of selfhood, but Buddhist "death" or enlightenment entails an obliteration or dissolution of any awareness of selfhood as such. Accordingly, Zen knows nothing of an actual abandoning of oneself, for there is no self to abandon.

It may well be possible to speak of Zen existential apocalypticism as King does, but we should be aware that this is a form of "apocalypticism" in which nothing actually happens, in which there is neither world- nor self-transformation. Even as Zen repudiates all actual ways to enlightenment, so in the last resort nothing is gained by enlightenment of satori, and thus the life of the sage is no different from the life of ordinary men. Of course, in one sense these Zen formulations are paradoxes that are intended to instill nonattachment and nonaction (wu wei). But in another sense they are celebrations of "Emptiness" that are intended to point the way to total calm or peace. I do not see how it is possible, at least from a Christian or Western point of view, to avoid identifying Zen as a backward way tg nal or primordial Unity. True, such an identification is not possible from the perspective of Zen itself, if only because Zen transcends any distinction between backward and forward or future and past. But we must inevitably look at Zen from our own perspective or point of view, even if our glances at Zen still and uproot our own vision. Indeed, it is only our discovery of Oriental religious or mystical ways that has initiated us into the full meaning of what must appear to us as "backward" ways to a primordial Unity or Totality. But thereby we have been given a new way into the "forward" way of eschatological faith.

Now if we entertain the possibility that a new and total way of eschatological faith has dawned in the modern world, one way into the meaning of that faith may well be by relating it to its Oriental counterpart. For both ways are total ways, therefore they are radical ways, and nothing whatsoever is untouched by their vision or practice. Initially, I was delighted with King’s judgment that the "history" which a Christian atheism claims to be the total consequence of the Incarnation is identical with Zen particularity. While such a "history" may indeed be present in the fullest expressions of the modern imagination, theology has only begun to understand that "history," and thus I must respond that King’s judgment is premature. Nevertheless, I believe that King has pointed to a legitimate goal of radical theology, although I would insist that an apocalyptic or total "history" must be in continuity with the actuality of the history that we in the West have known. Perhaps at no other point can such a continuity so immediately establish its importance as in the ethical or moral arena. King closes his essay with a discussion of what he terms "ethical indirection," claiming that neither Zen nor my own work has any clear ethical direction to present. No doubt this is true, but I would regard ethical indirection as an inevitable consequence of a total or radical way, if only because a total way uproots and dissolves or reverses all individual or particular ways, including the ethical way or direction. It is not accidental or insignificant that ethical ways disappear or are invisible as such in both the total ways of the Orient and in the most radical expressions of modern Western thinking and vision.

Nietzsche’s symbol of "Yes-saying" is a symbolic evocation of a total way, and it has inevitably been fiercely rejected and opposed by its theological critics. Theologically, however, we cannot understand Nietzsche’s Yes-saying unless we are aware of its atheistic ground and realize that it entails not only a negation but also a reversal of transcendence. On the one hand, this all too modern symbol of Yes-saying unveils the impotent passivity and the inhuman detachment of Christian faith in God, of Christian dependence upon and submission to God, the demonic consequences of which are so passionately portrayed in Ivan Karamazov. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s symbol of Yes-saying calls upon its hearer to become God, or to freely accept the total responsibility of God, a responsibility that Christianity had identified with the total sovereignty of the Creator. Once God is dead, the transcendent realm is emptied, and it is no longer possible to find life or hope in the beyond. But Nietzsche’s symbol of Yes-saying points the way to transforming transcendence into immanence, so that the emptying of heaven becomes identified as the transformation of heaven into "earth." As a consequence of this apocalyptic transformation or reversal, a new man or new creation dawns who embodies in himself the total life and power of the Creator. From the perspective of the old man or the old creation, this new power is terrifying, for it demands not only a total immersion in the here and now, but also a total responsibility for the world. Nothing whatsoever stands outside of this responsibility, for total Yes-saying demands not only an acceptance but also an affirmation of the All.

Is the Yes-saying of Nietzsche’s affirmation identical with the total affirmation of Zen? R. H. Blyth, among others, does not hesitate to draw this conclusion. I would rather suggest that just as Zen knows nothing of what we have known as transcendence, so likewise it has no awareness of what we are coming to know as total immanence. When we remember the overwhelming emphasis that Nietzsche gives to the "Will to Power," we are forced to recognize the chasm separating the total way of a modern Yes-saying from the total way or no-way of Zen. Nietzsche calls for an actual acceptance and affirmation, for a total willing of our real present as our own creation. This is at the opposite extreme from a total passivity or indifference to history, for it demands that the Yes-sayer assume total responsibility for both his own identity and his own world. Or, rather, world and individual identity here come together and are indistinguishable -- thereby truly paralleling Zen -- but their very identity is of such a kind that the individual not only wills but also enacts his total responsibility for the world. Nietzsche’s Yes-saying is a call to total freedom, but it is also a demand for total responsibility, and in demanding that responsibility it negates every form of responsibility or ethical direction that rests upon the authority or the power of the beyond.

Chapter 12: Zen and the Death of God by Winston L. King

Note: Winston L. King is Professor of the History of Religions at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

Since Zen Buddhism does not believe in god in any recognizably Christian sense, and since, for radical (Christian) theology, the Christian God is "dead," a comparison of the two suggests itself. Nor is their comparison a merely captious joining of two "atheisms." On the Japanese Buddhist side there is considerable interest, because the death-of-God language seems to approximate the historical Buddhist Dharmakaya language.1 And at least with Thomas Altizer -- whom we shall take to represent death-of-God "theology" -- there is a considerable return interest in Buddhism. Further, and perhaps ironically, Altizer specifically rejects Buddhism as inadequate because, in its quality as an Oriental mysticism, it seeks regressively to return to a transcendent primordial Unity for salvation.2

The question to be raised here is whether Zen (Buddhism) in its rejection of (Buddhist) "Oriental mysticism," and Altizer in his rejection of Christian and Buddhist transcendentalism, do not finally come to approximately the same position -- though by somewhat different routes. To this end we shall sketch the rejection-affirmation modes of each party to the comparison and in the third section draw our conclusions.

I

For Altizer the contemporary and very much alive Devil is Dualistic Transcendence. As a Hegelian he believes that the only creative form of dualism is of the dialectical sort in which every entity is always moving into union with its opposite. This kind of "contradiction" is "the root of all movement and life."3 But the traditional dualistic transcendencies of religion and philosophy are separated by an infinitely wide and deep chasm of irrelevance and unreality from the living immediacy of the ongoing world-process. Here "transcendence" is always and everywhere synonymous with the abstract, the empty, the meaningless, the past, the distant, and the dead in everlasting opposition to and separation from the concrete, the significant, the present, the near at hand, and the living.4

Hence Altizer’s war to the death against "God." For "God" as portrayed in Christian theology and embodied in the institutions and rituals of Christendom is the essence of evil transcendence and the root cause of all that is wrong in Christianity today. It is impossible for Altizer to be too emphatic here. "God" as mystery must be rejected since mystery means ‘silence and apartness from history and life."5 With Nietzsche he holds that "God" is "the deification of nothingness," in polar opposition to the world, "the contradiction of life," one who "crushes the life of man," "the deepest embodiment of . . . No-saying, [i.e.,] absolute life and self-negation."6 Such a God is the author, or the excuse for "the alien power of the moral imperative" which is "addressed to man from a beyond" and imprisons him "by an obedience to an external will or authority."7

The Christian theological tradition has created in "God" a uniquely monstrous transcendence "whose very sacrality is absolutely opposed to the life and immediacy of man’s existence in the world" . . . a feat unequaled even by Muslim or Jew!8 Hence one must "kill" the sacred-transcendent God.9 He must be specifically and deliberately pronounced dead by the Christian community, and even the putrefying corpse of his memory must be deeply buried lest its infection bring Christianity to its total death. Of course the death of the traditional Christian God calls for the death of traditional Christianity as well:

The modern prophet. . . has been given a vision which abolishes all that humanity has thus far known as light. Both the ancient and modern prophet must speak against every previous epiphany of light, calling for an absolute reversal of a fallen history as the way to life, with the hope that the destruction or dissolution of an inherited and given history will bring about the victory of a total epiphany of light.10 If Christ is truly present and real to us in a wholly incarnate epiphany, then the one principle that can direct our search for his presence is the negative principle that he can no longer be clearly or decisively manifest in any of his previous forms or images. All established Christian authority has now been shattered and broken.11

Thus only in knowing and declaring that God is dead can the Christian live as Christian. But it is precisely at the point of the death of God and the abolition of traditional Christianity that true (radical) Christianity is to be differentiated both from "religion" (false transcendence per se) and its supreme embodiment in Oriental mysticism:

Christianity, and Christianity alone, proclaims the death of the sacred; and only in Christianity do we find a concrete experience of the factuality and the finality of death. . . . No other higher religion in the world calls its participants to a full experience of the pain and darkness of the human act of dying as the way to transfiguration and rebirth. Unique, too, is the way in which the Christian is called to share or to coexperience Christ’s death, where a sharing of the passion of Christ becomes participation in the process of salvation.12

But before we can fully understand Altizer’s call for the death sentence upon all sacred entities in general, and God in particular, we must add Altizer’s emphasis upon kenosis, the Self-emptying of God into historical being. Now with this we are obviously moving into the area of affirmation. Altizer’s basic affirmation is precisely here, the kenotic emptying of all transcendence into the immanence and particularity of incarnation. For him the basic and uniquely Christian truth is the Incarnation.

What then does incarnation mean for Altizer? In general it means the dialectical (not dualistic) movement of God’s total being into his "opposite," the world of flesh-in-history, or historical being in flesh. It is assumed that this movement must be total and absolute; were any part or particle of God left behind, in terms of sovereignty or transcendent being, there could be no incarnation worth speaking of. Now was God’s movement into historical being in Christ unique and once for all, or is there a perpetual ongoing movement of God into historical being? The answer is both. Thus:

It [the Incarnation] is . . . a real movement of God himself, a movement which is final and irrevocable, but which continues to occur wherever there is history and life.13. . . If we conceive the Crucifixion as the original enactment and embodiment of the self-reversal of all transcendent life and power, then we can understand the atonement as a universal process present wherever there is life and energy, wherever alienation and repression are abolished by the self-negation of their ultimate source.14

Ultimate source means "transcendent God," of course.

Now the dualistic sin of the Christian church, its original heresy, is that of resurrecting Jesus into the heavens with God in glory and the designation of the church as Christ’s mystical body on earth.15 In actuality this doctrinal pronouncement represents a reversal of God’s kenotic movement into humanity in Christ’s flesh and in his death, for contrary to the spirit of kenotic incarnation, the church has become ever more sacredly apart from the profane, and the resurrected Savior ever more transcendent of the world. Not only so, but the church-style incarnation confines it to one man at one time in history. But though this is a primary manifestation, and initially occurred in Christ,16 the incarnation cannot be understood and participated in save as a total and perpetual process which moves on toward a supreme consummation:

At no point in this process does the incarnate Word or Spirit assume a final and definitive form, just as God himself can never be wholly or simply identified with any given revelatory event or epiphany, if only because the divine process undergoes a continual metamorphosis, ever moving more deeply and fully toward an eschatological consummation.17

This eschatological consummation will be the death of the transcendent God, his self-negation by a total incarnation of actualization "throughout the total range of human experience,"18 his "kenotic passion" fulfilled in a "new and liberated humanity"19 -- a humanity liberated from even the memory of God to become its own Divine Self.20

In conclusion to this sketch of Altizer’s affirmations we must say a word about his affirmation of the eschatological quality of Christianity which, he holds, most definitively and radically separates Christianity from "religion" in general, and Eastern mystical religion -- the essence of "religion" as such -- in particular. In this context Christianity is characterized as forward-looking -- toward the eschatological consummation of God’s full movement from transcendence into immanence. It is thus to be contrasted to the religious and Eastern-mystical looking backward from concrete, present historical reality to a primordial blessed Oneness of mystic peace as the final consummation.

Now Christianity has produced its own false form of apocalyptic in which the apocalyptic goal (eschaton) is thought of in a chronological sense as some far-off divine event toward which all creation and all history move. But this is a reversal of the true kenotic-apocalyptic process, for in the guise of moving forward it would instead be moving backward toward a repetition of the primordial unity and harmony. And in so doing it forsakes its uniquely Christian quality and becomes an Oriental-mystical type of "religion." It is here precisely that radical (true) Christianity must be separated from Buddhism:

At this point Buddhism presents an instructive contrast to Christianity, for here [in Buddhism] one discovers unbelievably complex systems of meditation centering upon the image of death, but here death is a way to a dissolution of the human condition, and therefore to the abolition of pain and suffering.21

That is, by the salvational dissolution of the human condition, Buddhism reverses incarnation and rejects the immanental consummation of true Christianity.

II

In Zen, as in death-of-God, we encounter a radical critique of the parent tradition. However, it should be observed at the outset that Zen does not seem to be as finalistic and radical in its rejection. For Zen Buddhists are still quite willing to be called Buddhists in the full sense, and in many ways are quite indistinguishable from other Buddhists. Perhaps part of the difference of tone lies simply in Eastern and Western temperament and cultural conditioning. Western dialectic is sharp, hard, definite. Eastern dialectic is softer and more indirect. And, after all, in the Buddhist-Eastern view, words and arguments never contain the definitive essence of matters religious.

Nevertheless there have been both rejection and criticism of the mainstream Buddhist tradition by Zen. One way of characterizing the Zen reversal is in the famous words falsely attributed to Bodhi-Dharma, but truly descriptive of Zen principles:

A special transmission outside the scriptures;

No dependence upon words and letters;

Direct pointing to the soul of man;

Seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Buddhahood.22

This is a kind of antitraditional Buddhism, so to speak. The real, radical teaching of Buddhism, according to Zen, is the "secret transmission" of the original enlightenment (Satori) experience directly from master to disciple in person-to-person confrontation; not by the scriptural or doctrinal route. Accordingly, as even a casual reader can observe, Zen tradition is full of aspersions cast on theoretical learning. Again and again one reads of a master who answers a disciple’s philosophical question with a complete and insulting non sequitur of nonsensical quality. The learned-in-the-scriptures disciple is held up to derision. And on occasion the sacred manuscripts have been used practically, i.e., for kindling a fire. So too, disregard, even insult, has been sometimes directed toward the Buddha. What is he? A dung stick, three chin of flax. The Buddha image? Fine for a fire to keep warm by. You must "kill the Buddha" before you can gain enlightenment, in the words of some of the Zen masters.

Yet some of this should not be taken too literally. One young Zen monk, concerned that Westerners should think that "Kill the Buddha" statements meant habitual insult of the Buddha in Zen circles, invited us to witness a Founder’s Day service at a Zen temple. Not only was there a majestically magnificent temple, but numbers of gorgeously robed priests, and a ritualistic order of service that put Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic liturgists to shame in the elaborateness with which the Buddha was honored by reverential and multiplied bowings and meticulously crafted ritual forms. It is also true that a Zen meditator in training hears numerous sermons on Buddhist truth, and frequently chanted scriptures; he participates in a rigidly prescribed manner of life that has no allowable variation save in that awful moment of truth when he confronts the roshi on his own and must speak forth what he himself knows of enlightening truth. In short we might say that Buddha and scripture denials are primarily methodologically and psychologically oriented; they are designed to shake one loose from easy dependence upon the mere forms of piety and open to him the deeper truth of his own being.

But the question of rejection or denial must be pressed on a deeper and more existential level than this. What does Zen reject? Dualism, in all its forms, and on every level. It finds the cerebral-visceral, thought-action, reflection-participation, abstract-concrete, intellectual-existential, good-bad dichotomies of most contemporary men to be unrelievedly tragic. It is the mark of their unsaved status, or in Buddhist terms, their inability to realize their own essential, i.e., Buddha, nature at every moment and in every action. This dichotomized or unsaved man, unable to perform any action with the totality of his being, is not as well-off even as the animal. Dr. Daisetsu Suzuki used to point to one of his cats and remark: "When that cat jumps, it doesn’t have to think: I am about to jump. It just jumps," in a perfect unity of thinking, feeling, being, and acting.

There are many other types of destructive dichotomy to be found in human life. For example, there is the distinction which men make between themselves as souls, selves, or thinking beings, over against the inanimate world of rocks, trees, and mountains. Dr. Suzuki was fond of saying that when a man sat in a garden contemplating a rock it was not a one-way operation, but that "something" returned from the rock to the man. Or, to reverse it: A man must somehow feel-think-intuit himself into that mode of being which is the rock’s. And in discussing this very situation, Professor Keiji Nishitani was quite unwilling (on a Zen basis) to allow one to speak of the mind of man as "including" the object of thought, i.e., the rock, in a way superior to that rock itself. The rock and its human observer were different, to be sure, but not in any hierarchical sense, nor in any fully separative manner.

Again, and fundamental to all Zen thinking, is the evil of the subject-object dichotomy. Because our basic modes of consciousness are always experienced in the context of subject vs. object, we can never see things as they truly are, nor see into our own true nature. For the subject-object relation is an assertion of ego, one’s ordering the world about his subjective, personal consciousness, and as such it offers a handhold to all of the invidious evaluations that separate men from things, from each other, and from their own deepest life itself.

Naturally, Zen also has much to say about the evil dualism of the transcendent and the immanent. If transcendence is to be thought of as apartness from, standing in opposition to, then it is to be condemned here just as roundly, if not as violently, as in the death-of-God view. Zen will have nothing to do with a "holiness" which is holy by virtue of being apart from the rest of life; it must be "sacred" by being intrinsic to life, or it is not sacred at all. The final state in the famous ten Oxherding pictures, which are a parable of the Zen quest for enlightenment, is that of the fully enlightened man who

is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers;

he and they are all converted into Buddhas.

Bare-chested and bare-footed, he comes out into the market place;

Daubed with mud and ashes, how broadly he smiles!

There is no need for the miraculous power of the gods,

For he touches, and lo! the dead trees come into full bloom.23

For Zen, not even the individual "self" is ever to be thought of as transcendent of the physical-mental events that constitute its present content. They are the self, in its totality and essence. As mind, or "no-mind" equally well, they are an integral part of the universal flux of events.

So too, more ontologically speaking, Zen rejects the noumenal as over against, within, or beyond the phenomenal; there is no other reality "behind" appearances. There is perhaps a depth dimension in which all realities are to be seen, but it is not separate from them in any way. Thus, says Suzuki, when Western-Christian-oriented Tennyson looked at the tiny flower in the crannied wall, first of all he plucked it. Then he began to think thoughts about "God and man" or about being "all in all," which he hoped would enable him to understand the mystery of all creation. But when Basho the Zen poet saw a flower he left it there and unromantically writes thus:

When closely inspected,

One notices a nazuma in bloom

Under the hedge.24

No more, no less. No need to bring in a God-thought at all. The flower is simply there to be totally sensed. Its perceived existence is its sacredness. In totally and perceptively sensing it, in ceasing to try to dominate, categorize, or change it in any way, one experiences in the very act of sensing it the totality of reality.

Here we are on the ground of affirmation. And indeed negation in Zen is difficult to separate from affirmation, for Zen insists that they are the same. To negate dualism is to affirm oneness; to negate separation is to affirm unity; to deny the unreal is to affirm reality -- without defining them. To negate anything is to affirm something else. In a true vision of reality, the distinctions of one and many, large and small, better and worse will be bypassed -- or transcended, if you will, by a nontranscendent kind of awareness. The greatest is the smallest and the smallest is the greatest. One finds the three million worlds in the tip of a single hair. Individuality cannot be separated from totality, nor vice versa. Each implies the other; or better, each is present in the other. And with regard to God, if he is to be thought at all, he is not transcendent or other, but present in, consisting in, the holiness of all that is. For isness is holiness; holiness is isness, just that and no more. To live a holy life is just to live life in all its natural fullness. For the moment we may then summarize the Zen radical immanence in this well-known passage:

Again, you and I sip a cup of tea. The act is apparently alike, but who can tell what a wide gap there is subjectively between you and me? In your drinking there may be no Zen, while mine is full of it. . . . In my case the subject has struck a new path and is not at all conscious of the duality of his act; in him life is not split into an object and subject, or into acting and acted. The drinking at the moment to him means the whole fact, the whole world.25

III

Zen immanental terms are not precisely death-of-God incarnational terms, but they seem to be within shouting distance of the latter. Therefore I wish to raise again the question in this final section as to whether Altizer, despite his rejection of Buddhism as definitely different from and lesser than Christianity, has not in the final analysis come full circle and embraced a Buddhist type of radical immanentalism. In support of this suggestion I will make four comparisons, drawing in part on statements already made, and in part upon further statements, particularly from the Zen side.

1. Though beginning from somewhat different bases, both death-of-God and Zen reject all transcendence modes that separate ultimate reality from contemporary living event. Zen begins with the ordinary individual who is separated from his own true Buddha nature by the false dichotomies of a "Buddha" far back in history, or now in Nirvana; or, more existentially, man as separated from the world around him by a subject-object dualism. For such a man rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains, and trees are trees, things of differing natures, apart both from each other and from the man who observes them. But after Zen meditation there comes a time when one is not certain of this ordinary sort of realism. A mountain as such is not a sharply separate entity. In itself and by itself it is not fully real. Not only does it imply all other things -- trees and rivers as well -- indeed it may be said to have tree-and-river nature within it, to be inseparable from tree and river in reality. And the meditator becomes troubled and confused. What is true reality?

But if he persists, the third and final step of enlightenment ensues. And how does he now see things? He sees trees as trees, rivers as rivers, and mountains as mountains. Mere word play? No. We have returned to the first condition, but spiralwise on a higher level. We now behold all things in their genuine immanental reality. They are in their very particularity, universal as well; to be universal is to be particular. There is nothing "beyond" this immediate reality, no substrate of Being, no mystically apprehended noumenon, no God who "clothes" himself mysteriously in phenomenal beauty and power. We -- things and persons -- just are; but in being, we are both many and the One.

Do not death-of-God Christianity and Zen here unite? For Altizer there is no longer a God out there, back there, up there, anywhere. All the God that is, is incarnate in the concrete realities of the here and now. We make him alive by killing him in his transcendence. We encounter him simply by immersion in living. True, Altizer from his Christian context speaks of involvement in "history," whereas the word "history" hardly ever crosses a Zen lip. And again, perhaps because of Christian backgrounds, Altizer has a certain preference for God’s incarnation in "human face and hand," rather than rocks, mountains, trees, and rivers. Perhaps these distinctions are crucial; but to me they seem peripheral.

2. Historical particularity is obviously, at least in Altizer’s case, a close corollary of immanentalism and incarnationalism. But two brief quotations will give it further point:

What is new in the Christian name of Jesus is the epiphany of the totality of the sacred in the contingency of a particular moment of time: in this name the sacred appears and is real only to the extent that it becomes actual and realized in history.26

In the modern historical consciousness, only two hundred years old, there has been

an eclipse of the transcendent realm, an eclipse resulting in the birth of a unique sense of historical particularity. . . . For the first time historical events appeared as radically particular, as confined in their meaning and value to the actual but singular process in which they occur, and thus as being wholly detached from a universal order or law.27

Note that again we have the prevalent "historical" motif; the Altizer particularity is historical particularity or event. And again this grows out of the general Christian context from which Altizer speaks.

With Zen, particularity is of a somewhat different sort by virtue of the Buddhist context of its assertion. And that Buddhist context has led many Christians to deny that the integrity and value of the particular can be had in Buddhism, especially that of the personal particular. Thus the late Paul Tillich in his Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, written shortly after his visit to Japan some years ago, says: "Only if each person has a substance of his own is community possible, for community presupposes separation. You, Buddhist friends, have identity but not community."28 It seems that quite logically Altizer should share in this general opinion, and see in the Buddhist pattern a denial of the humanistic, historical, and particularistic, for the sake of the Primordial Whole.

But contemporary Zen Buddhist scholars vigorously reject Tillich’s interpretation. In the above-mentioned person-and-rock discussion in which he rejected the superiority of the person’s nonstone capacity for "inclusion" of the stone in his field of thought and action, Professor Nishitani maintained that Zen Nothingness (sunyata), because of its indeterminate character, could include both the person and the rock in a "loving" relation, in which (1) each party could relate to the other in the true meaning of "love," without let or hindrance; and (2) at the same time respect the true identity of the other being without coercing it into any preformed, or prejudged, relational framework.

So also there was a specific rejoinder to Tillich’s statement by Professor Masao Abe, which I doubt that Tillich ever read.

Is not the dialectical nature of the Christian community and separation really not dialectical, thus not reaching the core of ultimate reality? Buddhist communion takes place as the communion of the "Realizer of Nirvana" with everything and everyone in the topos of the absolute Mu (i.e., nothingness) in which everything and everyone are respectively absolute, being just as they are, and thus absolutely relative.

True Sunyata, being the negation of sheer emptiness as well as sheer fulness, is an active and creative Emptiness which, just because of being itself empty lets everything and everyone be and work respectively in their particularity. . . . The several rocks with different shapes and characters which are placed here and there on the white sand are nothing but the self-expression of the true Sunyata which lets everything stand and work. Each rock is not simply something with a particular form but, equally and respectively, the self-expression, through the taking form, of the true Sunyata, that is, the True Self which is beyond every form.29

Again we see differences between death-of-God and Zen. But again, they unite in strenuously affirming the holiness of particularity: Altizer, the human historical particular; Zen, every particular as such.

3. As noted earlier, it is at the point of eschatology that Altizer makes his stand most particularly for the radical uniqueness of Christianity. Its uniqueness consists in its forward-looking eschatology as opposed to the backward-looking mysticism of "religion." He chides Christian theologians in general for not seriously taking history as a dynamic forward movement into God’s future. But whether this is a valid distinction must be judged on the basis of the essential quality of eschatologies. For, contrary to much Western opinion, Zen also contains a species of eschatology, in which worlds are passing away and the Great Death of cataclysmic change must take place before the New Order can enter in.

Of course in the Christian sense Buddhism has no genuine eschatology. There is no prospect of an Absolute present world order in the flaming fires of judgment, or of a new order forged in its flame. To be sure, there are world endings, some of them quite catastrophic. But there have been and will be many of them.

But Zen makes little, if anything, of such eschatological materials of even the limited sort that are available to it in its own Buddhist heritage. Yet it has its own immanental apocalyptic, of a most intense and radical sort. For what is the nature of life itself? A moment-by-moment succession of states of existence, each one of which dies before another can be born. Indeed human "existence," so called, is nothing but a tenuous film of shadow-being stretched over the great abyss of nonbeing. There is no solid ground underneath our feet, no solid place to stand on, only the foundation of the Abyss of the Void.

The eschatological myth of older ages that the cosmos must someday necessarily be burned up in a cosmic fire also entered into Buddhism. Buddhists, however, in their interpretation of this myth have always accepted it on the dimension of religious existence and transformed the idea of the end of the world into an existential problem. Viewed from this standpoint, this world as it is, with the sun, the moon and the numerous stars, with mountains, rivers, trees, and flowers, is as such, the world ablaze in the all-consuming cosmic conflagration. The end of the world is an actuality here and now, is a fact and a fate directly underneath our very feet.30

And how shall one escape this existential fiery abyss? By the Great Death: the great death of his own ordinary selfhood in all its dimensions; by a complete reversal of his hitherto-followed, conventional, ordinary subject-object modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. The same author writes further:

The very procedure of stepping out into the field of the scientific world view (from our religious teleological, human-oriented world views) is here translated into a decision to accept the universe with its feature of bottomless death as the place for the abandoning of oneself and the throwing away of one’s own life. . . . When he presented the eschatological situation of the world in terms of an unspeakably awesome cold, the Zen master offered to the questioner -- and through him to all things in the world -- a place for their Great Death. The myth of eschatology was thus de-mythologized and turned into the religiosity of the Great Death of the questioner as well as of the world itself.31

What then is the quality of Altizer’s eschatology? It sometimes preserves the Christian form in words of forward-moving progress into the future. In an essay entitled "William Blake and the Role of Myth" he speaks of "final Eschaton," "dawning Kingdom," of a dynamic and forward-moving process that will lead on to the "realization of a final paradise which must wholly transcend the paradise of the beginning."32 It is "a forward-moving process revolving about the absolute negation of the old cosmos of a totally fallen history."33 Thus the radical apocalyptic is at least dynamically going somewhere, in opposition to the Buddhist reversal process.

But where is somewhere? This is the crucial point. There are phrases like "The Great Divine Humanity" of Blake, in which God has become man and destroyed his own transcendent Godhood in the process; there is God’s progressively greater kenosis into "energy and life,"34 "energy and joy of body," "ever more fully into the depths of the profane" ;35 there is the Spirit, a la Hegel, "come to its own fulfillment in the immediate and sensuous present,"36 as final reality "in the actual and contingent processes of history";37 and Jesus as "the body of humanity,"38 or as the Christian name for the totality of experience of a "new humanity liberated from all transcendent norms and meanings,"39 and a "movement of Incarnation [that] has now become manifest in every human hand and face." 40

Can the conclusion be resisted that it is not into history as going somewhere chronologically or teleologically, but in "history" as individualized human existence in whatever form, that Altizer’s God incarnates himself? And how, save in peripheral terminology, does this distinguish itself from Zen existential apocalypticism? Indeed Altizer also speaks of the "extention of an eschatological future into the present."41 Not even Altizer’s assertion that this does not mean a mere submission to the brute realities of historical process clearly differentiates it from Zen.

4. Finally there is the almost inevitable result that neither Zen nor Altizer has any clear ethical direction to present. Writes Altizer:

The Christian who bets that God is dead risks both moral chaos and his own damnation. . . . [He] must do so with a full realization that he may very well be embracing a life-destroying nihilism; or, worse yet, he may simply be submitting to the darker currents of our history, passively allowing himself to be the victim of an all too human horror. . . . [There is the] very real possibility that the willing of the death of God is the way to madness, dehumanization, and even to the most totalitarian form of society yet realized in history.42

This of course is spoken out of Altizer’s conviction that all the Christian past -- historical, theological, ecclesiastical, ethical -- must be obliterated if incarnation is to be perfectly fulfilled. And consonantly with this, one looks in vain on the pages of Altizer for any moral-social direction the radical Christian should take, beyond that of plunging with all one has in him into contemporary "historical" action. The only discernible direction, ethically and historically, is into life, without asking or knowing where "life" and "history" are going or even what they are.

Not surprisingly we read a kindred passage in Professor Abe’s review of Tillich’s book referred to above, which sets forth a Christian-Buddhist contrast here in fine style:

It may well be said that the [acceptance of man] in-spite-of [his sin] character of the Christian faith, by means of prophetic criticism and the "will to transform" based upon divine justice, functions as a militant element in the realm of human society and history, whereas the just-because-of [human sin and selfishness acceptance] nature of Buddhist realization, . . . functions as a stabilizing element running beneath all social and historical levels. The in-spite-of character of the Christian faith is apt, I am afraid, to increase as well as decrease tension among people, to cause a new dissension as well as a great unity, thus falling into a false endlessness. On the other hand, there is always the risk, in the just-because-of nature of Buddhist realization which accepts everything indiscriminately, even social and historical evil, that one’s attitude toward the world will be, because of a false sameness, indifferent.43

In the end, is a radical Christian total involvement in, and affirmation of, everything that happens to man, any different from an indiscriminate acceptance of everything, of even social and historical evil? Perhaps only in its greater degree of enthusiasm.

Notes:

1. Professor Shojun Bando, of Otani University in Kyoto, finds the death-of-God theology significant because it divests the Christian god of his specific and personalistic attributes, his historical purposiveness, and his transcendence. Thus the final result seems to approximate Buddhist Dharmakaya, that Absolute Reality or Ground of Being which is basic to all and in all existent beings.

2. To use one book as a basis of comparison is admittedly limited, but in Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (The Westminster Press, 1966), all of the basic Altizer themes are to be found. It may be noted in passing that Altizer is in some sense the victim and product of the most extreme degree of that very dualism which he abjures so strongly in the name of Hegel. Its presence is on every page that he writes. We encounter the radical, abyss-wide oppositions of life and death, beginning and end, innocence and Fall, the light of Spirit and the darkness of flesh, the certainties of primordial Being and the uncertainties of history, the abstract and the concrete, God and the world. Hence also that dramatic apocalypticism which likewise appears on every page.

3. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 80.

4. Ibid., pp. 22, 39, 42, 45, 54, 67, 73, etc.

5. Ibid., p. 85.

6. Ibid., p.94.

7. Ibid., p. 127.

8. Ibid., p. 93.

9. Ibid., p.51.

10. Ibid., p. 152.

11. Ibid., p. 137.

12. Ibid., p. 51.

13. Ibid., p. 43.

14. Ibid., p. 113.

15. Ibid., p. 102.

16. Ibid., p. 108.

17. Ibid., p. 104.

18. Ibid., p. 108.

19. Ibid., p. 111.

20. Ibid., p. 113.

21. Ibid., p. 51. Italics added.

22. D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, ed. by William Barrett (Doubleday & Company, Inc., Anchor Edition, 1956), p. 61.

23. D. T. Suzuki, Essays on Zen Buddhism, First Series (London: Luzac & Co., 1927), p. 366.

24. D. T. Suzuki, Essentials of Zen Buddhism, ed. by William Barrett (London: Rider & Co., 1963), pp. 360-361.

25. Suzuki, Essays, p. 265.

26. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 57.

27. Ibid., p. 74.

28. Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 75.

29. Masao Abe, "Review Article," The Eastern Buddhist, New Series, Vol.1, (Sept., 1965), pp. 118 -- 119.

30. Keiji Nishitani, "Science and Zen," The Eastern Buddhist, New Series, Vol. I (Sept., 1965), p. 88.

31. Ibid., p.91.

32. Thomas J. J. Altizer, "William Blake and the Role of Myth," in Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, eds., Radical Theology and the Death of God (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), p. 186.

33. Ibid., p. 189.

34. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 75.

35. Ibid., p. 110.

36. Ibid., p. 118.

37. Ibid., p. 46.

38. Ibid., p. 70.

39. Ibid., p. 73.

40. Ibid., p. 136.

41. Ibid., p. 84.

42. Ibid., p. 146.

43. Abe, "Review Article," p. 121.

Daniel C. Noel poses a problem that is seldom stated by theologians but that has overwhelming implications for our contemporary theological or religious situation: What is the decisive difference between the religious ways of pre-death-of-God and post-death-of-God religion? By understanding pre-death-of-God and post-death-of-God as stages of religious evolution, Noel sees a full continuity between what he terms the way of momentary rebirth and the way of "on-goingness." The latter is understood as a Christian phenomenon, for a passing through the experience of the death of God leads to the apotheosis of subjective experience, which itself is a fulfillment of the continuing Incarnation culminating in the Christification of many. If this analysis is to stand, it depends upon the actuality of a new form or mode of the religious consciousness, one that transcends even while existing in full continuity with the previous stage of religious evolution. While I am fully persuaded that the death of God is a Christian phenomenon, and that it promises the Christification of all, I find that Noel’s portrait of "on-goingness" at no point transcends or goes beyond a pre-death-of-God stage of religious evolution.

Why, it may be wondered, does Noel place such an enormous burden in his argument upon the identification of Jung’s process of individuation as a truly new and yet Christian process of continual and interior self-redemption? Whether or not Jung may truly be identified as a Gnostic (and he has so identified himself on numerous occasions), there is nothing in what he describes as individuation that is not far more fully present in classical mystical ways of both the East and West. It is noteworthy that Noel ignores the world of mysticism, preferring to identify pre-death-of-God religion with Eliade’s archaic religion, and this leads him to the fantastic historical thesis that interior- and self-redemption arises only with the death of God. No doubt the individuation process will truly appear to be new if one confines all pre-death-of-God religion to the historical world of primitive or archaic man. Jung knew better, for already in 1920, with the publication of Psychological Types, Jung demonstrated his own immersion in the mysticisms of China, India, and Europe. Indeed, he never abandoned the theory of the "Self" that was formulated in this work, and the unifying or reconciling symbol of the "Self" ever thereafter remained the foundation and the goal of the individuation process, a process that Jung himself considered to be universally present in the collective unconscious.

In a section entitled "The Relativity of the Idea of God in Meister Eckhart" in the Psychological Types, Jung shows how a mystical way can concretely collapse the dogmatic distinction between "God" and the "soul." For Jung believed then, as he continued to believe until his death, that the goal of all the great religions is the subjective withdrawal of libido into the unconscious so that a libidinal power may therein be stored which in the form of "God" or the "soul" becomes the most active force in psychic life. By means of religious or mystical discipline or practice, this libido may be withdrawn from the unconscious, thus bringing about a regenerative attitude and a new life springing out of the reactivation of unconscious psychic energies. The birth of this libidinal power signifies a becoming aware of unconscious contents.

This is an act of conscious discrimination from the unconscious dynamis, a severance of the ego as subject, from God (i.e., the unconscious dynamis) as object. In this way God "becometh." When, through the "breaking-through," i.e., through a "cutting off" of the ego from the world, and through an identification of the ego with the motivating dynamis of the unconscious, this severance is once more resolved, God disappears as object and becomes the subject which is no longer distinguished from the ego, i.e., the ego as a relatively late product of differentiation, becomes once more united with the mystic, dynamic, universal participation (participation mystique of the primitives).1

Jung finds this meaning of "God" to be present in Christian, Indian, and Chinese mysticism, and he insists that it is identical with that "Self" which is the goal of all psychic growth. How, then, can Jung’s individuation process be identified as a post-death-of-God and specifically Christian way of "on-goingness"?

Initially I was intrigued with Noel’s suggestion that the replacement of dialectical thinking with metaphorical thinking would cure the regressive tendencies of my thought. But Noel’s real complaint seems to be that my dialectical method is tainted because it fails to return to the natural dialectic of Heraclitus and insists on assigning metaphysical primacy to post-Parmenidean concepts of contradiction. This is certainly true, for I do not believe that it is possible to reverse history and return to a pre-modem or primal thinking, whether of a Jungian or a Heideggerian kind. Unlike Jung and Heidegger, however, Owen Barfield does embrace the historical evolution of consciousness, and he does so by way of a radical understanding of the Incarnation. Or is it truly radical? Of this I am now unsure, particularly in view of Barfield’s most recent writings, to say nothing of the fact that his most fundamental loyalty has always been to Rudolf Steiner (whom Noel pointedly ignores). Already in 1927, moreover, Barfield hailed the backward glance of poetry, for it is by creating true metaphors that poetry restores (Barfield’s italics) the primordial unity of subject and object. At its birth, language is a living unity, but this unity is lost with the development of consciousness.

Accordingly, at a later stage in the evolution of consciousness, we find it operative in individual poets, enabling them to intuit relationships which their fellows have forgotten -- relationships which they must now express as metaphor. Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not conceptually experienced, but which can now only be reached by an effort of the individual mind -- this is what is contained in a true poetic metaphor; and every metaphor is "true" only insofar as it contains such a reality, or hints at it. The world, like Dionysus, is torn to pieces by pure intellect; but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it as a living body.2

In its infancy, language is all poetry. But with the development of conceptual thinking the primordial unity between subject and object is lost from perception. Now the connections between discrete phenomena can be apprehended only as metaphor -- for once they were perceived as immediate realities -- and it is the function of the poet to see these connections as immediate realities, and to make others see them, "again" (my italics).

At bottom there is nothing in this theory of poetry as metaphor that goes beyond the romanticism of the nineteenth century, just as there are no ideas of Jung that cannot be traced to a comparable source. If there is one motif that is common to all forms of romanticism -- and here I am speaking of romantic theory and not of the actual poetry of the so-called romantic poets -- it is a nostalgia for the lost innocence of a primordial beginning and a yearning for an original and undifferentiated form of consciousness. This romanticism was still present in the Nietzsche who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, but it was conquered in his prophetic realization of the death of God, and his consequent baptism of time and death in his vision of Eternal Recurrence. Yes, this vision of Eternal Recurrence is an acceptance of death as living in the Now, and it is just for this reason that it is opposed to all primordial forms of a coincidentia oppositorum. It is precisely those who most deeply refuse our world and the forward movement of history and consciousness who are now driven to a primordial way, a way that masks the profane reality of time and death by apprehending it as being at one with a primordial unity. Nietzsche points the way to a total refusal of every such primordial call, and his own thinking and experience is a model for the reversal of regression. For this reason alone the contemporary Christian should accept Nietzsche as a prophet and seer. Where else may one find such a consistent and comprehensive inversion and reversal of a pre-death-of-God stage of religious evolution?

II

There can be no gainsaying the power of process theology in the contemporary American Protestant theological world, and not the least source of this power is its ability, or the ability of its proponents, to enter and comprehend the most diverse forces upon the contemporary theological scene. Despite the fact that I was initiated into systematic theology by Daniel Day Williams, that I am an alumnus of the established academic center of process theology -- the Divinity School of the University of Chicago -- or, most important of all, that I have been in intimate touch with the thinking and criticism of John B. Cobb, Jr., for the past thirteen years, I continue to find process theology both conceptually and humanly unreal. First, I find it to be unreal because it is so closely bound up with the cultural world of liberal Protestantism. As Charles Harvey Arnold attempts to demonstrate in Near the Edge of Battle, a history of the Chicago Divinity School, there is a full and unbroken continuity between the liberalism of the early twentieth-century Chicago theologians and the liberalism of Meland, Loomer, and Williams. To this day, Cobb is the only process theologian who is even open to the challenge of radical relativism and nihilism. Thus I must begin my response to this critique from the point of view of process theology by citing a portion of Cobb’s criticism of Boston Personalism in his Living Options in Protestant Theology:

Personalism has great confidence in the reliability of a kind of common-sense speculation about the cosmos as a whole, whereas sophisticated moderns generally find such confidence naive and out of date. Even when sympathetic to such inquiry they find the results too suspect and humanly unreal to serve as a basis for ultimate decisions of life and death. Hence, it is not philosophers only, but spiritually sensitive moderns generally, who feel an ultimate frustration and emptiness before Personalism’s staggering claims about reason’s ability to know God.3

Now I recognize that process theology is far more sophisticated than Boston Personalism, and more sophisticated precisely because it is genuinely philosophical, but I fail to detect any substantial or real theological distance between Boston Personalism and Chicago Process Theology, just as I cannot fail to observe that both are so clearly related to the social world of modern American liberal Protestantism.

Whitehead himself, unlike Hartshorne and Ogden, repudiates the deductive method and the demonstrative claims of classical rationalism and, rather, attempts to arrive at a metaphysical system that will bring a consistent meaning and coherence to the critical ideas, mostly scientific, of his own time and world. We might then expect that process theologians who are in continuity with Whitehead would attempt to establish a theological system that brings a consistent meaning and coherence to the theological ideas or the religious practices and beliefs of the contemporary Christian world. After two generations of process theology this is finally, perhaps, being attempted; but surely it is a fact of some significance that process theology could exist for nearly forty years even while ignoring virtually all of the central or unique affirmations of the Christian faith. At no other point is there such an enormous distance between the English Whiteheadian theologians -- e.g., William Temple and Lionel Thornton -- and the Chicago School. Of course, Temple and Thornton were more classically Christian than philosophically Whiteheadian. But this leads to the inevitable question: Can Whiteheadianism be a conceptual vehicle for the Christian faith? Indeed, the common theological charge against process theology is that it is quite simply non-Christian. Here, we find no awareness of the Fall (except as a means of affirming total personal responsibility), no doctrine of sin as opposed to evil, no past or future eschaton, no atonement (except as a moral example), and no Incarnation (except as a "renewal" of the sense of the present immediacy of God). Does process theology not in large measure confront us with a contemporary expression of a traditional natural religion or natural theology? At what point do the theological affirmations of process theology decisively differ from the common-sense beliefs of traditional Western culture and society? Above all, is it because process theology has chosen to affirm the eternal reality of God that it is unable to speak specifically of Fall or eschatology or Christ?

Gier makes a major point of insisting that the retention of the past is a basic philosophic tenet of process theology. Now what can the retention of the past mean in a theological context? Surely it cannot refer to physical time, which for Whitehead is perpetual perishing. Does this mean that the "living immediacy" of temporal occasions is preserved in the consequent nature of God? If the consequent nature of God is "the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can, be saved,"4 does this mean that every positive value is everlasting in God? And does every such positive value provide a specific aim for some new occasion to realize in the future? Is not this very conception in full continuity with the classical liberal understanding of progress and progressive evolution? Is this not, furthermore, a religious way of providing an ultimate sanction for whatever has occurred or happens to be? Does not such a total affirmation of the past foreclose the possibility of a truly new or revolutionary future? Such a judgment must inevitably occur from the perspective of a radical Hegelian understanding of history, as can be seen from Engels’ interpretation of those primal words of Hegel, "All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real":

And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right, of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality -- peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality; and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, no matter how much it contradicts existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.5

What can it mean to speak of the richness of the past in the context of our revolutionary situation? Is process theology yet another priestly and counterrevolutionary assault upon that actual future which now lies before us? How can we retain all past forms of experience and move forward to a truly new future?

At no point do I feel a greater distance from process theology than in its affirmation of the absolute value and reality of the unique and individual person. Here, process theology is in full continuity with Boston Personalism, as it is with liberal Protestantism in general. In brief, my response to this fundamental affirmation of liberal Protestantism would he that the idea of the ultimate value and reality of the individual is historically limited to the classical period of modern Western culture, and that it can have neither a living meaning nor a truly human form in a post-modern or post-liberal period of history. When theologians affirm that every quest for a genuine and lasting polis is identical with the development of "personhood" in community they should be aware that -- at least from a Marxist or revolutionary political point of view -- they are serving as ideological spokesmen for a modern Western or bourgeois conception of politics and society. Hopefully, radical theology is truly apolitical and nonethical, if responsible ethical and political action are identified with the established forms of modern Western politics and ethics. Now I cannot pretend that I have reached a positive ethical or political way, but so far as I am aware a positive and radical ethics or politics has not yet been reached by any school or movement of theology. The only positive ethics or politics that we possess are clearly grounded in historical worlds of the past, and for this reason alone responsible theologians have opted for the retention of the past. But there can be no avoiding the truth that in our historical situation an affirmation of the past is at the very least in grave danger of negating and opposing an actual and real future.

No, as opposed to Gier, I continue to believe that the great challenge of process theology is in its doctrine of God, rather than in its conception of the personhood of the individual. For apart from what process theology affirms as the absolute presence of God there would be no ground for the ultimate reality and responsibility of the individual. If each new moment, according to process thought, is open to the infinite range of possibilities contained in the primordial nature of God, then is possibility as such finally grounded in God’s purely conceptual and unchanging envisagement of eternal objects? Whitehead conceived the primordial nature of God as this timeless envisagement of possibilities, and God’s ordering of the eternal objects is such as to specify the initial aim for each new occasion. While God is the sole ground of the initial aim of each occasion, every actual occasion is a novel addition to the universe. "Creativity" is inescapably an aspect of every such entity, but as Cobb interprets Whitehead, "God must be conceived as being the reason that entities occur at all as well as determining the limits within which they can achieve their own forms." 6 In view of this fundamental metaphysical conception of the relation between God and the world, Cobb’s understanding of the otherness of God as absolute nearness can be seen as a way of affirming the sovereign and primordial power of God.

If process theology is truly a rebirth in a contemporary form of an ancient natural religion or natural theology, then we should expect that process theology is unable to envision a truly new creation or new humanity. A dipolar conception of God seems to promise a genuine theological understanding and affirmation of creativity, and even of a forward-moving creativity, but, rather, the truth would seem to be that the God of process theology forecloses even the possibility of a new humanity. Once the primordial nature of God and its timeless ordering of eternal objects is envisioned as the ground of novelty, then not only can there he no fundamental or ontological change of reality, but potentiality as such must be limited to a primordial envisagement of possibility. God is manifest solely as the Creator, for even the consequent nature of God is God’s physical pole, his prehension of the actual occasions constituting the temporal world. It is pot accidental that process theology cannot speak of Christ or eschaton, for the eschatological goal of humanity is limited to a renewal of the sense of the present immediacy of the Creator. No contemporary form of theology has given us such a full and genuine conceptual understanding of God as has process theology, but the price that process theology has been forced to pay for its doctrine of God is its negation of both the meaning and the reality of Christ.

It is instructive at this point to contrast Whitehead’s metaphysical understanding of the primordial nature of God with Hegel’s dialectical understanding of Spirit. If the primordial nature of God is absolute because it always retains its self-identity, a fully dialectical form of Spirit is absolute because it is identical with itself even when it fully exists and is finally real as its own inherent otherness. The question of the fundamental meaning of "identity" is paramount here. In the Science of Logic, Hegel conceives identity as being nonidentical with itself. The essential moment of identity is that in which it is determined as being its own negativity even while being different from "difference." Its difference is not from an "other," but from itself: it is not itself, but its own "other." Thus the fullest moment of identity is that in which it passes beyond itself into self-dissolution. It is not accidental that it is this very section of the Science of Logic (Vol. I, Bk. II, Sec. I) that Hegel identifies the law of contradiction as the alternative expression of the law of identity, insisting that both are synthetic rather than analytic, and that when each is thought through to its own inherent conclusion they both cease to be formal and abstract and, rather, transcend and negate themselves by making "contradiction" manifest as the root of all movement and life. Accordingly, the pure or formal reason of Verstand is not opposed because of an opposition to reason as such. On the contrary, pure reason is here understood to pass beyond or to dissolve itself, and it is just this self-negation of pure reason which makes manifest the active and dialectical reason of Vernunft.

No one who has even the slightest knowledge of Hegel’s dialectical method of thinking, or who is aware of its immense impact upon the contemporary world, could think that his conception of identity and contradiction is simply absurd or arbitrary. Nor need the Christian Hegelian necessarily feel threatened in the presence of the logical power of the Christian Whiteheadian. What is at issue theologically is the question of whether Hegelian or Whiteheadian thinking is the best philosophical vehicle for the contemporary expression of the cognitive meaning of the Christian faith. And not the least claim that can he made for the Hegelian method or mode of thinking is that it is truly and fully a cognitive expression of the eschatologica1 and Christological ground of the Christian faith. Thus the Christian Hegelian can say that God is most truly and fully himself when he transcends and passes beyond his own identity and becomes "other" than himself in the eschatological event of Christ. God is identical with Christ, yes; but this is a dialectical identity, for it is only insofar as God dissolves himself as God that he is manifest and real as Christ. Apart from such a movement of "self-negation," there can be no new creation in Christ, and no advent of a new world or new humanity. Does a Whiteheadian dipolar conception of God make possible either an eschatologica1 understanding of Christ or a Christological understanding of eschaton? Surely this is one point at which Whiteheadian and Hegelian theological thinking could engage in fruitful dialogue, and perhaps the course of this dialogue will reveal that each is closer to the other than either is to any other system of thought. After all, both are genuine forms of "process" theology, just as both are full and genuine expressions of modern thinking. Is there any other contemporary theological movement about which these judgments could be made?

 

Notes:

1. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types, tr. by H. G. Baynes (London: Brace, Trench and Trulner, 1923), p. 316.

2. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1964), p. 88.

3. John B. Cobb, Jr., Living Options in Protestant Theology (The Westminster Press, 1962), pp. 82 f.

4. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (The Macmillan Company, 1929), p. 525.

5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Schocken Books, 1964), p. 217.

6. John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (The Westminster Press, 1965), p. 211.